What Makes Ability in English?

Abstract

During the past generation success in the various high-school subjects has been measured with increasing objectivity. At the same time interest in the relation between general intelligence and success in a given field and between success in one field and in another has had a steady and generally wholesome growth. While much of the interest in these relations owes its greatest impetus to the desire to predict success in the high school on the basis of elementary-school work or to predict success in college on the basis of high-school achievement, a large share of it has been focused, particularly in recent years, on special subjects and subject combinations in the high school. Believing that in the field of his major interest, English, the race is not always to the brightest nor the stigma of failure to the dullest, the writer set about obtaining data for a study of his own. Intelligence quotients derived from the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability, the Haggerty Intelligence Examination, and the Otis Self-administering Tests of Mental Ability were available from the individual pupil records in the office. The Terman and the Haggerty tests had been administered when the members of the group studied, the Senior class in high school, were in Grade VII; the Otis test had been given to them when they were in the first year of high school. To get a fourth measure, the writer used Army Alpha to test the surviving members of the Senior class. Four measures were available for 92 of the 102 members of the class. These 92 pupils were then given the Inglis Tests of English Vocabulary. Finally their English marks for the six semesters that they had been in high school were averaged. When the averages of the four intelligence quotients for every pupil are correlated with the average English marks for the six semesters in high school by the method of the scattergram and the