Finally, the choice of a short-column or of a long-column test is indicative of the measurer's notion of the kind of efficiency the world properly demands of the school. Twenty years ago the author would have been readier to accept a long-column test than he now is. In the world at large, long-column addition is being more and more done by machine, though it persists still in great frequency in the bookkeeping of weekly and monthly accounts in local groceries, butcher shops, and the like.
The search for a measure of ability to add thus puts the problem of speed versus precision, and of short-column versus long-column additions clearly before us. The latter problem has hardly been realized at all by the ordinary definitions of ability to add.
It may be said further that the measurement of ability to add gives the scientific student a shock by the lack of precision found everywhere in schools. Of what value is it to a graduate of the elementary school to be able to add with examples like those of the Courtis test, getting only eight out of ten right? Nobody would pay a computer for that ability. The pupil could not keep his own accounts with it. The supposed disciplinary value of habits of precision runs the risk of turning negative in such a case. It appears, at least to the author, imperative that checking should be taught and required until a pupil can add single columns of ten digits with not over one wrong answer in twenty columns. Speed is useful, especially indirectly as an indication of control of the separate higher-decade additions, but the social demand for addition below a certain standard of precision is nil, and its disciplinary value is nil or negative. This will be made a matter of further study later.
MEASUREMENTS OF ABILITIES IN COMPUTATION
Measurements of these abilities may be of two sorts—(1) of the speed and accuracy shown in doing one same sort of task, as illustrated by the Courtis test for addition shown on page 28; and (2) of how hard a task can be done perfectly (or with some specified precision) within a certain assigned time or less, as illustrated by the author's rough test for addition shown on pages 28 and 29, and by the Woody tests, when extended to include alternative forms.
The Courtis tests, originated as an improvement on the Stone tests and since elaborated by the persistent devotion of their author, are a standard instrument of the first sort for measuring the so-called 'fundamental' arithmetical abilities with integers. They are shown on this and the following page.
Tests of the second sort are the Woody tests, which include operations with integers, common and decimal fractions, and denominate numbers, the Ballou test for common fractions ['16], and the "Ladder" exercises of the Thorndike arithmetics. Some of these are shown on pages 36 to 41.
Courtis Test
Arithmetic. Test No. 1. Addition
Series B