Howard Andrew Knox and the origins of performance testing on Ellis Island, 1912-1916.

Howard Andrew Knox was Assistant Surgeon at the immigration station at Ellis Island, New York, between April 1912 and May 1916. In response to public disquiet that the physicians at Ellis Island were failing to prevent mentally retarded people from entering the country, Knox and his colleagues assembled a collection of performance tests that could be administered to potential immigrants with little knowledge of the English language. They were subsequently used in clinical practice and in educational, psychological, and social research. Because of the early work done at Ellis Island, it is nowadays taken for granted that any adequate measure of intelligence must include both verbal and performance subtests.

[1]  H. A. Knox.  A SCALE, BASED ON THE WORK AT ELLIS ISLAND, FOR ESTIMATING MENTAL DEFECT , 1914 .

[2]  G. Kurian,et al.  A historical guide to the U.S. government , 1998 .

[3]  G. Whipple.  Manual of mental and physical tests , 1911 .

[4]  P. H. Dubois.  A history of psychological testing , 1970 .

[5]  R. Yerkes.  A Point Scale for Measuring Mental Ability. , 1917, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[6]  E. Yew.  Medical inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891-1924. , 1980, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine.

[7]  JoAnne Brown,et al.  The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930 , 1994 .

[8]  G. Arthur.  A new point performance scale. , 1925 .

[9]  R. Pintner,et al.  A Scale Of Performance Tests , 1917 .

[10]  R. Yerkes,et al.  Army Mental Tests , 1920 .

[11]  L. Kamin,et al.  The science and politics of I.Q. , 1974, Social research.

[12]  H. Goddard.  Feeble-mindedness, its causes and consequences , 1914 .

[13]  R. Siegler.  The other Alfred Binet. , 1992 .

[14]  R. Yerkes,et al.  The importance of social status as indicated by the results of the Point-Scale method of measuring mental capacity. , 1915 .

[15]  A. Kraut.  Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and American Efficiency, 1890–1924 , 1988, Social Science History.

[16]  A. Jensen,et al.  Race, social class and ability patterns on the WISC-R. , 1982 .

[17]  D. Berch,et al.  The Corsi Block-Tapping Task: Methodological and Theoretical Considerations , 1998, Brain and Cognition.

[18]  H. Babcock.  An experiment in the measurement of mental deterioration , 1930 .

[19]  W. Healy,et al.  Tests for practical mental classification. , 1911 .

[20]  Grace Lyman,et al.  The Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon scale and some results from its application to 1000 non-selected children. , 1915 .

[21]  Henry Herbert Goddard and the origins of American intelligence testing , 1986 .

[22]  G. Kimble,et al.  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology , 1997 .

[23]  R. Yerkes.  Psychology in relation to the war. , 1918 .

[24]  P. W. Bowman,et al.  PHS Public Health Service , 1963 .

[25]  Naomi Norsworthy,et al.  The Psychology of Mentally Deficient Children , 1907, The Psychological Clinic.

[26]  R. Yerkes.  A Point Scale for Measuring Mental Ability. , 1917, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[27]  A. Macmeeken.  The intelligence of a representative group of Scottish children , 1939 .

[28]  N. Rose.  The psychological complex : psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939 , 1985 .

[29]  W. SquiresJ..  New York Medical Journal , 1917 .

[30]  H. Babcock.  The short Army Performance Scale in clinical practice. , 1932 .

[31]  H. W. Nissen,et al.  A STUDY OF PERFORMANCE TESTS GIVEN TO A GROUP OF NATIVE AFRICAN NEGRO CHILDREN1 , 1935 .

[32]  Philip M. Corsi.  Human memory and the medial temporal region of the brain. , 1972 .

[33]  The standardization of Knox's Cube Test. , 1915 .

[34]  G. Whipple,et al.  The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence , 1915, The Psychological Clinic.

[35]  M. Worthington.  A study of some commonly used performance tests. , 1926 .

[36]  B. Johnson,et al.  A Comparison of Mental Age Scores Obtained by Performance Tests and the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale. , 1922 .

[37]  Philip Babcock Gove,et al.  Webster's third new international dictionary of the English language, unabridged, with seven language dictionary , 1971 .

[38]  F. Gaw.  A STUDY OF PERFORMANCE TESTS , 1925 .

[39]  Tomaso Vecchi,et al.  Measures of visuospatial short-term memory: The knox cube imitation test and the corsi blocks test compared , 2001, Brain and Cognition.