The psychometric tradition: Developing the wechsler adult intelligence scale☆

Psychometrics, as the science devoted to the quantitative measurement and statistical appraisal of mental abilities, is generally traced to the ideas elaborated by Francis Galton in his book, The Human Faculty and Its Development, published in 1883, and more particularly to the tests he used and the data he collected at the “laboratory” he set up at the International Health Exhibition in London the following year. This was some four years after Wilhelm Wundt inaugurated the laboratory of experimental psychology at The University of Leipzig. The proximate dates of the establishment of the two “laboratories” may have been purely coincidental. So far as I have been able to discover, Galton’s investigations were little influenced by the goings on in Wundt’s laboratory in the prior four years. But it may be of interest to note that some of the important figures in the early history of psychometrics, like J. McKeen Cattell and Carl Spearman, were students of Wundt, and that their students in turn, e.g., E. L. Thorndike and R. S. Woodworth, started out as experimental psychologists, and later made important contributions to the new science of psychometrics. I seemingly followed this trend, half a generation removed, having studied under Woodworth, Cattell, and Thorndike at Columbia University, and spent some three months with Spearman at the University of London. But that was long before I began thinking about standardizing the battery of tests initially called The Wechsler-Bellevue or BellevueWechsler, and now more familiar as the WAIS. My interest in psychometrics, however, dates some years back. Actually, it began with my induction into the United States Army (World War I), and my assignment to the School for Military Psychology at Camp Greenleaf, Georgia. It was at Camp Greenleaf that I learned to give the Army Alpha and Army Beta, and to administer the recently published Stanford-Binet and Yerkes Point Scales, and along with them a number of individual performance tests.