Archives – Fall 2002

Photo: The Henry Goddard Papers, The Archives of the History of American Psychology, The University of Akron

Pioneers in Standardized Testing

Soon after the United States entered World War I, the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits was formed by Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, to design mental tests for selection of Army recruits. The committee developed a prototype of the Army alpha examination, a group-administered paper-and-pencil test given to wartime recruits, which was the first large-scale administration of an intelligence test and a landmark in the development of standardized testing. The Army testing program was documented in a 1921 volume of the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Yerkes, who directed the Army testing program and other psychological projects at the National Research Council, is best known as a primatologist. The photo was taken during a 1917 committee meeting at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey.

(Front: Edgar Doll, Henry Goddard, and Thomas Haines. Rear: Frederic Wells, Guy Whipple, Yerkes, Walter Bingham, and Lewis Terman.)