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In this book on intelligence testing, Professor Dearborn has avowedly left the beaten track and discusses the problems of individual psychology which the intelligence tests have raised from what he believes is a fresh angle. Believing as he does in the validity of the tests as a psychological instrument, he is far from accepting them uncritically, and thinks that the time has come for a critical examination of the tests and the suppositions that underlie them. This he undertakes in this volume.
The first chapter discusses the rating of pupils by the ordinary methods of marks in comparison to their rating by intelligence tests, and finds that they are very largely in agreement; this, he believes, is because the teacher and intelligence tester are measuring essentially the same thing. The most startling claim of the testers has been for the constancy of the intelligence quotient, and Professor Dearborn at once throws down the gauntlet to those who insist that this constancy is due to an innate quality of the mind, and declares that it presupposes a like constancy in environmental conditions for the group compared. A later chapter (IV) takes up this question in detail, and discusses the nature of intelligence and the influence of schooling, maturity, and environment. Various studies with contradictory findings are discussed, the conclusion being that until we have studies of the relative influence of native endowment, psychological maturity, health, schooling, special training, and environment in general, carried out on the same individuals over a period of years, we are not justified in making any sweeping assertions regarding intellectual development in childhood and youth. The chapters on individual differences and on special abilities and disabilities are excellent, and call attention to the fact that cannot be too often stressed; i.e., that our schools favor the child of verbal and linguistic ability and penalize the one whose interests lie in other fields. The int