Withdrawals from Junior High School

Abstract

Considerable attention has been given to the holding power of the junior high school and to the adjustment of the school to the pupil. Much time and effort has been spent, as it should be, in adjusting the curriculum to the needs of the individual pupil. In schools whose enrollment is large enough to permit the segregation of pupils into homogeneous ability groups, the important question confronting the teachers and administrator is To what extent does a course of study for the slow group differ from that for other sections? Before the question raised can be answered, a study should be made to determine what relationship, if any, exists between in tellectual ability?as determined by standard tests?and staying ability. The writer found, in a previous study, a close relation ship between achievement in school work and the intelligence quo tient. It seems fair, therefore, to take the intelligence quotient as a measure of intellectual ability.1 We have always' known that, gen erally speaking, the better students remained in school and the slower ones dropped out as soon as the law permitted. The present study represents an attempt to determine quantitatively, from objective data, this relationship. Local conditions, of course, al ways determine to some extent the number of withdrawals from school. Nevertheless, it is believed that the local conditions in the city from which these data were collected are not materially dif ferent from conditions in hundreds of other communities through out the United States. Since the junior high-school system was organized in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, incoming pupils have been given the Otis Group Intelligence Tests, and records of withdrawals from school have been kept. Names of the 316 pupils who entered Garfield Junior High School in September, 1922 and 1923, were tabulated, for the purposes of this study, in the order of their intelligence quotients.