Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing

by James Burt Miner

CHAPTER IX. COMPARISON OF THE SCHOOL TEST AND THE BINET TEST

There has been considerable discussion of the question whether psychological testing should be expected to conform to the ranking of pupils in school. This discussion however, does not attack the question in which we are especially interested, i. e., how to get the best information from both. If the school level were measured by the progress made in school by passable work and not by the school position attained often merely through age or size, Binet would be right in expecting that in general they would correspond among groups of children in the public schools. Agreement with real school progress could, therefore, be taken as a criterion of a good series of tests, as it has been by Binet and Bobertag. On the other hand Meumann and Abelson were right in objecting to the proof of the value of tests by agreement with the school level, if they limited their objection to tests applied to exceptional children and to using school position as a final test of school level. Lack of correspondence with our group of delinquents is, of course, no indication of a weakness in the Binet scale. In numerous instances they had been promoted in school because of age without doing passable work. The reader should also see the evidence of the teacher's bad judgment of a pupil's ability assembled by Terman and by Terman and Knollen ([196]).

Terman has calculated the correlation between intelligence quotients determined by the Binet scale and the teacher's estimates of scholastic or of general ability. These gave coefficients of .48 and .45. Doll has found for Goddard's data on school children that the correlation of school grades is closer with life-age than with test-age, .84 as compared with .73 ([12]). This indicates an influence of life-age upon promotion. In a school for deficients Burt found the correlation of teachers' estimates with Binet ages was .55, with mental retardation or excess .59, with intellectual quotient .48. He quotes McIntyre and Rogers as finding coefficients about .5 for similar calculations with normal school children in Scotland ([85]). Starch has shown that measured by the combined ability in reading, writing and spelling a third of the pupils are in a grade behind and a third are in a grade ahead of their ability ([186]).

However much we might disagree as to how close a correlation might be expected between the Binet tests and school level, independent of the relation to life-ages, or which is the better test, it is certain that they afford two different symptoms of mental deficiency. It becomes our immediate problem, therefore, to discover how the most information may be gained from a careful interpretation of the test of school level. If we had sufficient data, three sorts of checks might be formulated. 1. What amount of school retardation will give us the best estimate of mental deficiency among groups? 2. What amount of school retardation should put an individual's mentality in question so that he should be examined? 3. What amount of school success should put in question a Binet diagnosis?

A. Practical Uses of the School Test.

(a) Estimating the Frequency of Deficiency By School Retardation.

We shall first take up the question of utilizing information about school retardation in estimating the frequency of mental deficiency among groups of delinquents. It is perfectly clear that retardation in school position is not always an indication of mental retardation. A child may be behind the position in school reached by the children of his age merely because he has not attended school so long as his companions. A census of school progress which we took in Minnesota indicates that in general a large part, perhaps half, of the retardation in school is to be thus explained even under compulsory attendance laws. Some allowance is also to be made for physical handicaps, such as defects of sight and hearing which are not corrected, illness which does not cause prolonged absence, frequent change of schools, bad home conditions, etc. Aside from absence, however, there can be no question that greater or less degrees of mental retardation is the main cause of retardation in school. Moreover a dull mind is often the reason for beginning school at an older age and for staying away from an unsuitable school environment as much as the law will permit. In any particular case, it is to be noted, however, that all of the excuses for backwardness in school are not likely to account for more than one or two years of lagging for other reasons than dullness.

We cannot hope at present to get nearly so accurate a judgment about the frequency of deficiency in groups by means of any school test as by the psychological tests. Nevertheless, I believe that it may furnish us some supplementary evidence. The main difficulty in formulating any general rule for interpretation of the school level is that very different plans of promotion prevail in different school systems. It is not uncommon, for example, to find that a child will be promoted to a higher grade regardless of his ability provided that he has spent two years with the same teacher. This practise, of course, makes it impossible to judge a particular individual's ability by the school grade he has attained without knowing how he reached it. Nevertheless, spending two years in each grade will begin to show in a general distribution of pupils by the time we deal with 12-year-olds. I have gone over the tables of school retardation of pupils provided by Strayer for several hundred cities in the United States and I find that the percentage method of approach gives us at least a rough cue as to what might be expected by any general principle of interpretation ([189]).

Using age 7 as satisfactory in the first grade, 8 in the second, and so on, we find that among 319 cities of all sizes, half of them had 2% or more retarded four or more years in school position. This condition was about the same for cities less than 25,000 as with the larger cities. On the basis of school position for groups of children of all the school ages it would, therefore, be safer to make a low estimate of the frequency of mental deficiency on the basis of five or more years of scholastic retardation in the groups and regard 4 years or more of school retardation as a maximum estimate. Since most children leave school at 14 it is generally best to regard all older as only 14 years of age when estimating deficiency. I have not been able to check this by school and test records on a group of children through all the grades. Goddard's published records do not give the mental ages for those four or more years retarded scholastically. Moreover, he only included those in the sixth grade and below. For a group of young children this estimate would undoubtedly be too low. The delinquent groups, however, are all older. Most of them, if they lived in this country have gone to school until they were at least 14 years of age. Wallin ([211]) and Strong ([190]) also give records of school position to check the Binet rating.

TABLE XV.

Percentages of Pupils 12 and 13 Years of Age Most Seriously Retarded in School

	Percentages Retarded
	4 or more grades	5 or more grades
Cincinnati, Ohio—June 1907	8.8%	2.5%
Cleveland, Ohio—1909-1910	3.0	0.9
Des Moines, Iowa—1915	1.0	0.2
Memphis, Tenn.—June 1908	6.6	1.5
Minneapolis, Minn.—June 1915	1.3	0.5
Pittsburgh, Pa.—1913	4.7	1.1
Springfield, Mass.—Sept. 1907	1.2	0.1
Reading, Pa.—1906-1909	2.2	0.4

The distributions for Cincinnati, Memphis and Springfield are taken from Ayres' Laggards in Our Schools. That for Minneapolis is from unpublished data. That for Reading is from Snyder's Retardation in Reading Public Schools. The others are from Superintendents' reports.

By considering only pupils in the public schools who are 12 and 13 years of age, the last years in which practically all are in school, we can get a check upon this method of estimating for delinquent groups. I have compared the age-grade distributions for those of these ages in eight cities showing the percentages retarded 4 or more and 5 or more years. They are given in Table XV. These records indicate that at least five or more years retardation below a standard of age 7 in the first grade for all who are 12 years of age or over might be taken for a low estimate of the frequency of deficiency, and four or more years retardation for a maximum estimate. Except under special circumstances those who are older than 14 years should be considered as if the highest grade attained was at 14 years of age. These borderlines of school retardation for the purpose of estimating the frequency of deficiency check fairly well with estimates for the Minneapolis and other groups of delinquents which have been tested by the Binet scale, as we shall note later in this chapter.

In order that the school test of mental deficiency should be as good as the Binet system it would have to provide a standard of school progress relative to length of attendance instead of school position relative to age. If one could say that a child was not above the lowest 0.5% of the children of his age in the progress which he had made in school relative to the time actually spent in school, one would then have an excellent standard for judging feeble-mindedness for any child who had been in school for some years. It would be better if an uncertain region were also defined. By the time that a child's ability has been passed upon for four or five years and by different teachers, even from the point of view of the needs of school work, one has a criterion for mental ability in a particular community applied under long observation, which no system of brief tests can hope to equal for some time to come. Such a standard, however, is unfortunately not available since we have too little information about school progress relative to attendance. Even if it were available, psychological tests would still be an important check upon the school judgment on account of the excessive value put upon mere memorizing in school and on account of the emotional repulsion to the school developed by some children of ability. Mental tests would be necessary, moreover, for the younger ages.

(b) School Retardation As A Warning Of The Need For Examination.

Even if no more is known than a person's grade in school at any age over eleven it is an important cue as to his mentality. Here our problem is not estimating deficiency among groups but the discovery of deficient individuals. We wish to find the highest grade in school in which we are at all likely to find children under present conditions who test in the lowest 1.5% for their ages. Our records on 653 15-year-olds indicate that a pupil of this age who tests doubtful is very rarely retarded less than 3 years in school. It occurred only twice when tested ability was judged by the 1911 tests, four times judged by the 1908 scale. None of the 15-year-olds who tested presumably deficient were retarded less than three years. In Minneapolis, as in many cities, the custom prevails of promoting, regardless of passable work, after two years have been spent in a grade.

We suggest, therefore, to be perfectly safe, it is well for every child in court to be examined who is two years retarded in school below the standard age of 7 in the first grade and is not able to carry work above the seventh grade. This will include a considerable number of children at the lower border of those presumably passable.

Binet used this standard of two years retardation in recommending examination for children 9 years of age or over (3 years below age 6 in the first grade) (77, p. 44). He adopted it from Belgium. It is also quite commonly followed in this country. The New Jersey law provides for special classes in any school district where there are ten or more children four or more years behind grade. This probably means behind the theoretical position of age 6 in the first grade, one year worse retarded than we suggest examining. Goddard says in one place that “a child who has been in school regularly and is two or three years behind his grade is so suspicious that it is almost certain that he is feeble-minded” ([116]). But later he is much more conservative and says, “The child who is fourteen years old and cannot pass an examination in fourth grade work is almost surely feeble-minded” ([34]). As judged by Strayer's tables the suggestion that examination is desirable for those two years behind a standard of age 7 in the first grade would tend to bring in for examination about 18% of the school boys in half of the cities of 25,000 population and over. This would not be too severe a burden for courts which would be interested only in that portion of these retardates who were brought into court.

This school test may be made of decidedly practical use by those working in juvenile courts where most of the cases are with children over this age. It can be applied in a very simple manner by subtracting 8 from the child's age and only passing without testing those who are in a grade in school higher than the number remaining. For example, if the child is 13 years of age, subtracting 8 gives 5. Now, if the child is in the fifth grade or lower, or entered such a grade at the time he was of this age, one should investigate the question of feeble-mindedness. Unless more than one year of the retardation is explained by the person's absence from school since he was six years of age, he should always be turned over to an expert for examination. This retardation of two years in school attainment below the standard of seven in the first grade may indicate feeble-mindedness if the child has been attending school constantly, although the chances are perhaps 6 to 1 that it does not. It is very desirable that we should have more adequate data on this point. A cautious court, however, would inquire into the mental ability of any child—at least two years retarded in school, i. e., any child the number of whose school grade is not higher than the remainder after subtracting 8 from his life-age at the time that he entered his last grade or who is not actually carrying the school work of an advanced grade. This latter caution we must now consider.

(c) School Success As A Check On The Binet Diagnosis.

The school test can give us still another practical cue as to feeble-mindedness in examining children. Ability to carry successfully school work of some grade certainly could be used as a systematic criterion of passable intellectual ability. What school grade indicates this is not at present possible to determine except as a rough practical check. With the great irregularity in school grading at present known to exist, it certainly would not be possible to say that fifth grade work indicates a passable intellect, although some of the oldest local schools for deficients, like those in Mannheim, do not pretend to carry children above the fourth grade work. Speaking of the school success of the intellectually deficient, Binet said: “One may draw the conclusion, which is of practical value, that one need not seek children of this group in the senior divisions of the primary schools” (77, p. 44). This would correspond to the sixth and seventh grades in this country. Tredgold gives a careful description of the highest work in a London special day-school for the highest grades of deficients. It shows that even fifth grade work would be beyond what is actually taught the children in this school. He says:

“The work done by this class consists of reading and writing, equivalent to normal Standard II; compound addition and subtraction up to 1000, and simple multiplication and division. Excluding a few children—who, in my opinion, are not really defective—it may be said that the scholastic acquirements of none of these children come up to the Standard II. In occupations and manual work they are decidedly better, and a considerable portion of the children of this class can cut out and make simple artificial flowers, knit rugs and weave baskets, with a really very creditable amount of dexterity, which redounds in no small measure to the patient, persevering and systematic care of their teacher” (14, p. 173).

Some of our group with doubtful intellects do better than this. When considering the borderlines with the Binet tests we decided that a child was presumably passable if he scored a test-age of XI. This score would not be made by 11-year-olds as a group, but could probably be attained by 12-year-olds. We may then ask what is the corresponding school position attained by 12-year-olds who have been continuously in school. At the same time we must ask whether the lowest 1.5% of the children of any single age can attain this school grade since it should be high enough to exclude the deficients, no matter how long they have attended school. We happen to have this information for a random group of Minneapolis elementary school pupils on the basis of census of school progress per years of schooling. Considering only the children who had been in school since they were six years of age, we found that 82% of 186 12-year-olds and 92% of 174 13-year-olds had reached the seventh grade, and that the lowest 1.5% of neither age nor of any of the older ages could apparently carry the work of this grade no matter how long they had remained in school. Our records included older pupils who were in their eleventh year of attendance on the elementary schools.

Another indication that reaching the seventh grade is presumptive evidence of passable intellects is found in the fact that none of our group of 653 15-year-olds testing presumably deficient with the Binet scale and only four of the six who tested doubtful intellectually had reached the seventh grade. On the other hand those that think that a 15-year-old testing XI is deficient will be interested to find that 42 out of 51 who tested XI with the 1908 scale were in the seventh grade or above. We are convinced, therefore, that it is a conservative position to take that either passing the Binet tests XI in the 1908 series or ability to pass successfully the seventh grade in school is good evidence of a passable intellect. The rule, of course, does not apply to those who are passed along to the seventh grade because of their size or age regardless of ability to carry the work.

B. Checking Deficiency Among Delinquents by the School Test.

Let us see what the rough preliminary estimates on the basis of school retardation would indicate for the Minneapolis delinquents. We may disregard the upper limit of 14 years since compulsory attendance in Minnesota for backward pupils continues until age 16. For the limits of five and four years of retardation in school below the standard of 7 years in the first grade we would have estimates of 2.6% to 6% of deficiency among the ordinary cases of delinquent boys and 14.7% to 23.1% among the ordinary delinquent girls. Among the recidivist group of boy offenders 3% to 11% would be below these borderlines. Among the Glen Lake School group 12% are four years or more and 4% five years or more retarded. This last is to be compared with our judgment on the basis of individual examinations with the Binet scale in which we concluded that 2% were presumably deficient and 5% doubtful as to deficiency. The estimates on the basis of school retardation are somewhat too large. This would certainly be true for older delinquents. In as much as the laws for compulsory school attendance usually do not enforce attendance after 14 years of age, it would probably be better generally to treat all over 14 years of age as if they were of this age at the time of leaving school. This limiting age of 14 checks more closely with the mental examination records reported by Williams ([149]) and Ordahl ([41]) for groups of delinquents in the California state schools.

With her unselected group of 88 women at the Bedford reformatory, Weidensall found that 39% had not completed the fifth B grade (60, p. 23). This is not far from the estimate of presumable deficiency among such inmates on our borderline with the Binet scale. Considering the actual years of school retardation relative to years of attendance, so far as she was able to discover, and adding the 8 who never attended school, we have 20% five or more years retarded in school and 28% four or more years retarded (60, p. 251). She says further regarding the bi-modal distribution of ability which she found among her group:

“The division which alone served to separate the better from the poorer subjects was that of the grade completed upon leaving school. Those who had accomplished the completion of at least 5B grade formed a curve which paralleled very closely that of the Cincinnati girl of fifteen, while those who had not succeeded in passing 5B comprised the majority of those who collected at the poorer mode of the Bedford 88 curves. Throughout, the grade completed has proved to be more often a measure of our subjects' ability to progress in school, less often a measure of their opportunity to attend school.”

The administrative officers of institutions may make rough estimates of the frequency of serious deficiency among their charges by regarding all over 14 as if they were 14 years of age or under, disregarding those under 12 years of age, tabulating the highest school positions reached, and finding the frequency of those four or more and five or more grades retarded below a standard of age 7 for the first grade. It would be well for each court also thus to make an estimate of the size of the problem of deficiency in its jurisdiction. According to the second suggestion which we have made, the Minneapolis Juvenile Court, for example, should plan to examine for mental deficiency all those two or more years retarded in school or about 20% of the boys found delinquent and nearly half of the girls. The prospect would be that the number sifted out as having feeble intellects will be less than 10% of the ordinary run of cases.

Let us study a little further into the detention home cases tested by the Binet scale and see what additional light their school position throws upon the question whether or not they are defective delinquents. Four years retardation in school position would have called attention to both of our sure cases of feeble-mindedness. On the other hand, it would have brought in for examination only 4 out of the 7 doubtful cases. Three years of school retardation would have sifted out all but one. Two years school retardation, the rule suggested above, would have detected all those who tested doubtful. It would have required 56 examinations in this group to have found the eight cases suspicious under our test criteria. We also find that, among the random 15-year-olds not delinquent, examining all those 3 years retarded would have discovered all that tested even doubtful intellectually.

Applying the rule that ability to carry seventh grade work is a good indication of a passable intellect, we find that none of our Glen Lake delinquents testing either presumably deficient or doubtful had reached the seventh grade. On the other hand, if one were disposed to object to saying that a person who passes Binet tests XI (1908) has a passable intellect, one finds in reply that 16 out of the 22 Glen Lake delinquent cases testing XI and three or more years retarded intellectually, i. e., presumably passable, were carrying seventh grade work or better.

In examining individuals the importance of checking each of these tests with the other seems perfectly clear. If a boy fails in the Binet tests and shows better school ability one should certainly be cautious in his diagnosis. On the other hand a boy who is seriously behind in school may be found by the Binet scale to have a better intellect, so that the inquiry must be further extended to determine the cause of his school retardation. Retardation in school is generally not as fundamental a symptom of deficiency as retardation in the tests because of the numerous other causes of delay in school.

After allowance for the external causes of backwardness in school one finds that the test of progress in school and the Binet examination not rarely reach two different sides of the nature of unusual children found in juvenile court. Working with these exceptional children, Dr. Kramer observed that school performances were often notably different from ability in the tests. After checking the two tests against each other in examining 59 cases sent to him from the Society for the Care of Delinquent and Dependent Children in Breslau and 59 children at the psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he says regarding the result of this comparison:

“For the valuation of the Binet method, it shows us that the first objection which occurs to one, that the method tests only school knowledge, is not correct. On the contrary it was found that we had to do in high degree with that which was independent of what the child had learned in school and with real abilities which the normal child is accustomed to acquire by a certain age uninfluenced by training and instruction.”

He emphasizes, however, that to answer practical questions regarding the training of a child, “we must not only examine into the understanding but the total personality must be taken into consideration” (184, p. 519).