The Selection of Candidates for Trade School from a Group of Subnormal Italian Girls

are given an opportunity to enter the Manhattan Trade School. In previous years the selection of the girls, in a great measure, was based on their Stanford Binet I.Q. and their educational achievement scores. More recently the Girls Mechanical Assembling Test has been added to the battery of tests given to the candidates for entrance into trade school. The Girls Mechanical Assemblying Test was devised by the Institute of Educational Research for the vocational guidance of girls in their early teens. It discovers the ability of the girl to deal with things and mechanisms. It tests her manipulative or manual skill. There are five groups of tests: simple assemblying, hard assemblying, pasting, sewing and cutting. There are eleven parts with a possible score of 110 points. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the same selection of candidates was made with and without the assemblying test among the battery of tests given to ungraded girls desiring to enter trade school. As the majority of the girls in the ungraded classes are Italian, it was decided to limit this study to an unselected group of Italian girls. Sixty-five Italian girls who were fourteen years of age were given tests of educational achievement and the Girls Mechanical Assemblying Test. All of them had previously been given the Stanford Binet Intelligence Examination. The tests of educational achievement used were the Thorndike-McCall Reading Scale, the Haggerty Reading Examination Sigma I and the Woody McCall Mixed Fundamentals. The range of Binet I.Q.s was from 50 to 75 with a median I.Q. of 65. The range of scores on the reading test was from zero to 5A with a median grade achievement of 3A. The range on the aritli-