Mental Measurement of Pre-School Children

two contains a valuable survey of the work done previous to the MerrillPalmer Scale in the testing of infants and children of the pre-school ago, with critical comments. The chapter carries an implicit argument for the need of such a battery of tests, carefully standardized and statistically evaluated, adapted to children of five years and under. The criteria for the selection of tests for children of this age, presented in chapter three, are well-taken and express the ideals which guided the author in the formation of this scale. These criteria are inherent interest for the child, the testing of a large variety of activities and abilities, tests graded in difficulty by equal or approximately equal steps, tapping congenital abilities that all children have had some chance to develop, simplicity of material. Ease of administration, objective scoring, marked differentiation between age groups, range of groups small enough to yield a high positive correlation between the score and age of the child within the group, adequate sampling, size of group sufficiently large to render conclusions statistically valid, ease of scoring constitute the large order on the formal side.