measuring achievement by ability

Measuring Achievement by AbilitySource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 20, No. 6 (Jun., 1925), pp. 661-663Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7314 .

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 661

In the midst of the Great War when England seemed in imminent danger of starvation through the cutting off of her shipping by U-boats, the British government set the Royal Society to finding what crop would produce the largest amount of food on this limited land. The War Food Committee reported, in "private and confidential circular No. 46," that the Jerusalem artichoke was better than potatoes, for it could be grown on waste land without preparation and with little cultivation, and that the yield in gardens ran up to 20 or 22 tons per acre.

Unlike the sugar beet, the artichoke is not impaired in sugar content by freezing, so the tubers can be kept in storage or left in the ground until it is convenient to work them up in the factory. The factory can therefore be kept running for eight months in the year instead of three with conse- quent reduction of overhead and investment.

The tubers yield ten to twelve per cent. of levulose. Formerly crystal- lized levulose was sold, or rather quoted in the catalogs of rare chemicals, at over a hundred dollars a pound. The new process may reduce the price to that of common sugar, or cheaper considering its superior sweetening ,power. It has one disadvantage that may interfere with its table use; that' tis, it absorbs water from moist air more readily than salt, and so is apt to 4Ieliquesce into a syrup.

So it seems that we need not depend upon imported sources for our 1sugar, the tropical cane or the European beet. The Jerusalem artichoke does not come to us from Palestine, but is a native weed, one of our wild sunflowers, that means that it is immune from destructive insects and dis- eases and needs but little encouragement to make a good crop.

MEASURING ACHIEVEMENT

BY ABILITY

SCHOOL teachers are at last beginning to see a way to remedy what has been hitherto regarded as an inevitable defect of the educational process, the appalling waste of the most valuable material in ftih wnrldr ftih fime. flip effnrtsz annd fthe lhnnes of

youth. Year after year as the teacher met the fresh faces in his college classroom he has been saddened by the thought that of these students, perhaps brought there by high ambition, perhaps sent there at parental sacrifice, a certain proportion must fail despite what all that they or he could do. They had all passed the entrance examination and possessed the minimum requirement of knowledge, yet neither he nor they could tell whether they were qualified for the tasks that would be imposed upon them in the next four years, or whether both would lose their labor.

Now, however, it is possible for a high-school senior to find out with a very high degree of probability what will be his success in college studies. The new examinations devised for this purpose are objective, comprehen- sive, fair and impersonal, and they test both the factors of success, training and aptitude. In one state over 1,500 students have now been followed through their third year at college, and their achievements, in most cases, come close to the predictions based upon these qualifying examinations.

Professor Carl E. Seashore, of the University of Iowa, in his address recently before the National Academy of Sciences on the discovery and motivation of the gifted student, called attention to the amazing magnitude and fixity of individual differences as disclosed by mental measurements. For example, one student may have ten or twenty times as good a memory for the shapes of things as another student has. Or the same person may have ten or twenty times as good memorv for such geometrical forms as he



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DR. EMIL ADOLF VON BEHRINGE The distinguished German immunologist, discoverer of diphtheria antitoxin.

From a painttng by Klein-Chevalier



THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 663

has for differences in the quality of musical tones. The accurate knowledge of such different aptitudes is of inestimable value in determining whether a boy or girl should undertake training to be an artist or a musician. Such knowledge can be obtained at a surprisingly earlv age and it is surprisingly persistent. As Professor Seashore savs:

"The sense of pitch and the sense of rhythm, for example, may be mea- sured early in childhood and are found to remain constant throughout life except for deterioration, normal or pathQlogical, despite most elaborate education and special training. A boy who is quick and accurate is likely to be the man who is quick and accurate in any particular type of motor process. As our measures of intelligence are gradually improved, we find more and more evidence that the intelligence quotient of 75, 100 or 125 tends to remain fairly fixed throughout life, with or without extensive education of the individual."

On account of the infinite variety of individuals and the wide range of their capacity, it is manifestly unfair to require of them all the same amount of work or the same grades. It has been found that for an examination, which the upper quarter of the class should pass with a grade of 75 per cent., the passing grade of the poorest members of the class, if they made equal effort, should be set at 25 per cent. To set the same requirement for such unequal abilities in the classroom is as unfair to both ex- tremes as it would be in the gymnasium to require them all to jump over a three-foot bar, which for some would be impossible and for others child's play. The new educational slogan, according to Professor Seashore, is "to keep each of the students busy at his highest natural level of successful achievement."

The present practice of whittling down square pegs to fit into round holes may in time be abolished by means of placement tests and vocational guidance. It is coming to be realized that all young Americans are entitled not only to the opportunity for education, but to the particular kind of education to which they individually are fitted for. The old Socialist motto, "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs," is the motto of the new education.

THE QUESTION OF ETHER DRIFT

A DRAMATIC culmination of a controversy that has divided the scientific world for more than forty years was the appearance upon the same program of the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting of two nanpers whieh tresent

new evidence on the question of Einstein's theory of relativity. The first paper was by the president of the academy, Professor A. A. Michel- son, of the University of Chicago, whose historic experiments in 1881 first showed that there was something wrong about our traditional ideas of space and time, and so led to the Einstein theory. The second was by Professor Dayton C. Miller, of the Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, who has recently repeated the original Michelson experiments on the top of Mount Wilson, California, and got different results which conflict with the Einstein theory.

The question at issue is whether there is an ether pervading all space and if so whether it is stationary or is carried along by moving matter.

All attempts to prove the existence of the ether or to measure "ether drift" through moving bodies have so far failed. The crucial experiment



measuring achievement by ability

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