Tuesday, October 20, 2009

School age

When I was at primary school we had regular reading tests. You went up one by one to stand at the side of the teachers desk & read aloud, sight reading that is, a paragraph printed on the piece of paper he handed to you. The rest of the class got on with the work that they had been told to do.

Your performance was marked according to some agreed scheme which gave the result in terms of reading age – in years & months. This was divided by your proper, chronological age, to give one measure of IQ. The result was always reported to your parents.


There must have been plenty of scope for argument about the reliability, precision, accuracy, reproducibility & generalisability from the research samples on which the tests were based. But at least they showed awareness of the ‘summer baby’ problem


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