Describe Cattell’s approach to intelligence testing and explain why that approach was eventually abandoned.
James McKeen Cattell was a psychologist and became interested in measuring the intelligence of humans. He later moved on to studying several aspects of applied psychology. He was interested in philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and physics.
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Cattell founded a psychology laboratory affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, where he wanted to test and measure intelligence. He used the word ‘Mental test’ first time in an article he published regarding the lab work. He described 10 mental tests that he wanted to administer to the public.
In the year 1891, he started to administer his tests to fresh college students when he moved to Columbia University. He assumed that as the tests were measuring intelligence, the performance of his tests should be highly correlated as well as the relation between the tests and the academic performance of the respected students.
Cattell’s approach towards Intelligence testing was eventually abandoned because in the year 1901, one of his graduate students, Clark Wissler, measured relationship among his tests and the academic performances of the students with the help of Pearson’s Correlation coefficient. He found that inter-relations were very low and there was no relation between the result of Cattell’s tests and the academic success of the college students.