Thorndike CAVD Intelligence Scale: Thorndike's connectionist IQ scale

About the Thorndike CAVD Intelligence Scale

Edward Thorndike at Columbia Teachers College was the most influential American educational psychologist of the early 20th century. He was also Spearman's intellectual opposite: Spearman believed intelligence was a single general factor; Thorndike believed it was the sum of many specific connections (his 'connectionist' theory of mind).

Thorndike's CAVD intelligence scale was designed to make his theoretical position empirically testable. He proposed four broad task types - Completion (sentence completion), Arithmetic, Vocabulary, and Direction-following - and claimed that intelligence could be measured as the sum of performance on these four. The scale produced both an overall score and a profile of strengths and weaknesses across the four types.

CAVD was not as widely adopted as Otis or NIT in schools, but it was extremely influential in the academic psychometrics literature. Thorndike's empirical findings on the patterns of intercorrelations between cognitive tasks formed part of the evidence base that Thurstone later used to develop the Primary Mental Abilities (1938) - though Thurstone interpreted the same data as supporting multiple factors rather than Thorndike's connectionist model.

The 4 subtests

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at adult difficulty.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Thorndike, E. L., Bregman, E. O., Cobb, M. V. & Woodyard, E. (1927). The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Teachers College Press.

Public domain. Edward Thorndike (1874-1949) was the founder of American educational psychology and a major figure at Columbia Teachers College for forty years. He was an explicit opponent of Spearman's g, believing intelligence was the sum of many specific connections rather than a unified factor.