Psychological Examining in the United States Army: Definitive Army testing compendium

About the Psychological Examining in the United States Army

After WWI ended, Robert Yerkes - who had chaired the committee that designed the Army Alpha - was given the task of writing the definitive scientific history of the Army testing program. The result was Volume 15 of the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, published in 1921. At 890 pages, it remains one of the longest and most thorough volumes ever produced in psychometric history.

The 1921 Memoirs contains: the complete history and rationale of the Army testing program; all 5 forms of the Army Alpha (Forms 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) with complete items; the Army Beta with complete visual materials; the individual examination protocols (Stanford-Binet adaptation, Yerkes Point Scale adaptation, Healy completion, Knox Cube); complete statistical analysis including reliability and validity studies; and normative data on 1.7 million WWI recruits.

If you are looking for a specific Army Alpha or Beta item, a specific recruitment-camp's normative data, or a specific procedural detail, this is the volume that contains it. The Yoakum & Yerkes 1920 volume (which we used to extract Army Alpha Form 5) is a popularization of the 1921 Memoirs; the Memoirs is the definitive source.

The 5 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Yerkes, R. M. (Ed.) (1921). Psychological Examining in the United States Army. Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. XV. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Public domain - US government work. This is the single most important primary document of the WWI Army testing program. Anyone doing serious research on the Army Alpha, Army Beta, or WWI-era psychometrics works from this volume. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/psychologicalexa00yerk.