SPECIALIZED VOCATIONAL TESTS AND METHODS
The absence of complete vocational psychographs has not retarded the search
for tests which, though more or less fragmentary, may have vocational
significance. In fact, there are some twenty types of work for which tests
have already been proposed, recommended, and more or less tentatively tried
out. A brief account of these, with references to the more complete
literature, will be given here, and some attempt made to evaluate the tests
themselves.
Substitutes for the vocational psychograph, in the way of partial and
suggestive tests, have been proposed in four different forms. Since the
work of the immediate future will probably develop along these same lines,
these four forms will be indicated here, and typical illustrations cited in
each case.
A. There is first what may be called the method of the vocational
miniature. Here the entire work, or some selected and important part of it,
is reproduced on a small scale by using toy apparatus or in some such way
duplicating the actual situation which the worker faces when engaged at his
task. Thus McComas, in testing telephone operators, constructed a miniature
switchboard and put the operators through actual calls and responses,
meanwhile measuring their speed and accuracy by means of chronometric
attachments. Stern and others recommend tests of the fidelity of report of
a witness in court by letting him observe some rehearsed scene, some motion
picture representation of a series of events, or some pictorial portrayal
of a scene or episode, and examining into the faithfulness with which he
can describe what he there saw.
B. Closely related to this method of miniature performance is that of
taking an actual piece of the work to be performed and sampling the
candidate's ability by his success in this trial. Thus, in connection with
the recommendation of clerks and assistants from among the boys in
commercial high schools it is common to test their ability from time to
time throughout their course by assigning them small pieces of work similar
to that which they might later be required to perform in business offices
and shops. Finding addresses and numbers in a telephone directory, carrying
out involved verbal instructions and directions from memory, computing
calculations, recommending action on the basis of their figures, making out
a trial balance, a trial chemical analysis, etc., are common forms of this
type of test. In certain cases such specimens of work have been devised in
or taken into the psychological laboratory and the worker watched more
closely and measured more exactly. This has been done, for instance, by
Thorndike in the case of clerical workers and salesmen, by Paynter in the
case of judges of trade-mark infringements, by Scott in the case of
salesmen, and by others in the case of tests for handwriting experts.
C. A third method has been that of analogy. Some test is devised which
bears real or supposed resemblance to the sort of situation met by the
worker in the given occupational activity. The material is new, but the
attitude and endeavor of the worker seem to be much the same. There is
indeed usually a tacit or expressed belief that the same simple or complex
mental processes or psychological functions are involved in the two cases,
although the precise nature of this function has seldom been clearly
stated. Thus girls employed in sorting steel ball-bearings, and also
typesetters, have been selected on the basis of their speed of reaction to
a sound stimulus. Muensterberg has suggested that marine officers who can
quickly perceive a situation and choose an appropriate mode of reaction to
it may be selected by letting candidates sort into their appropriate piles
a deck of cards bearing different combinations of letters. The same
investigator has described a test for motormen which, while being neither a
miniature of their required work nor yet a sample of it, is said to produce
in them much the same mental attitude. In another case telephone operators
were tested for speed in canceling certain letters from a newspaper page,
in the belief that this work involved an ability that was also required at
the switchboard, although there directed to different material. McComas has
described a dot-striking test for measuring accuracy of aim or motor
coordination, which forms an essential factor in manipulating a
switchboard.
D. Finally there are cases in which tests having vocational significance
have been sought by purely haphazard and empirical ways. Thus Lough, having
devised a form of substitution test in which certain characters had always
to be replaced by certain others, according to a prescribed key, then
proceeded to apply it to groups of commercial students. Speed of
improvement was chosen as the thing of interest in respect to the test.
Measures of this capacity, as shown by repeated trials with the same test
day after day, were then compared with measures of ability in different
types of work in which the students were engaged. It was found that the
test records agreed very closely with the abilities in typewriting, fairly
closely with abilities in business correspondence and stenography, whereas
there was not such definite relation found between the test records and
ability in learning the German language or in mathematics. The test is
consequently recommended as a useful means of detecting typewriting and
stenographic ability. It is not pretended that the test is a miniature of
the work of such calling, nor that it is a fair sample of such work, nor
even that it involves precisely the same mental functions that come into
play in such work. The test records and ability in the particular type of
work show high positive correlation, which means that an individual who is
good or medium or poor in the one is, as a mere matter of fact, also found
to be good, medium or poor in the other. Hence, without further analysis,
the one may be used as the sign of the other.
Another good illustration of the use of this method is the study of Lahy,
who put good, average and poor typewriters through a great number of tests
of different sorts. He found that the only tests correlating closely with
ability in the practical work were those for memory span, tactile and
muscular sensibility, sustained attention, and equality of strength in the
two hands.
Perhaps the most perfect example of this purely empirical procedure is the
investigation which has now been conducted for several years by Mrs.
Woolley and her co-workers in Cincinnati. Children who leave the grades to
enter directly into some sort of industrial occupation are examined by a
miscellaneous assortment of simple mental tests. These records are
preserved, and the subsequent successes or failures of the pupils in the
various sorts of work undertaken by them in later life are as carefully
recorded as is possible. It is hoped that when a sufficient amount of
material of this nature has been accumulated the two sets of data may be
compared and information thereby secured concerning the relation between
ability in the tests and the types and degrees of industrial fitness. At
present only the test records have been published.
In a recent investigation an attempt was made to discover, by this
empirical method, a set of mental tests which would aid in the selection of
efficient workers in a specific field. Thirty workers who were already
employed under fairly comparable conditions of work were taken as subjects
in a preliminary search for tests of value. These thirty people were each
put through a series of "association tests," of the familiar laboratory
form, naming opposites, naming colors and forms, completing mutilated
passages, following hard directions, giving responses bearing specified
relations to stimulus words, cancellation and number checking, etc. While
these tests were in progress, during a period of several days, the thirty
workers were rated by three supervisors who were familiar with their work
at the actual task, and who had for some time been observing their
performance with a view to making subsequent judgments. Each supervisor
arranged the thirty workers in an order of merit, according to his or her
impression of their relative efficiency. The judgments of these three
supervisors were then averaged and each worker assigned a final position on
the basis of these averages. This was believed to be as accurate a measure
of actual ability as could be secured under the complex conditions of work.
The results of these ratings were then compared with the results of the
mental tests. Some of the tests were found not to correlate with the
ratings for actual working efficiency. Three tests showed definite and
positive correlations, as follows: _Color-Naming_ (thirty-seven per cent),
_Hard Directions_ (forty per cent), _Completion_ (thirty-three per cent).
When results from these three tests were combined, the records correlated
with the ratings by a coefficient of fifty-five per cent. These three tests
were then accepted as having value in the selection of good operators, and
search was continued for further tests which might also yield positive
correlations. This investigation is again an illustration of the purely
empirical method.
These four procedures in the search for useful vocational tests, in the
absence of complete vocational psychographs, are quite generally recognized
to be but tentative expedients of an explorative character. Individual
workers have not always clearly recognized the principles involved in their
work, but have proceeded as best they could under the special
circumstances. Each method has its own defects and advantages. The
miniature model has the advantage of concreteness and apparent relevance,
but, as Muensterberg points out, "a reduced copy of an external apparatus
may arouse ideas, feelings and volitions which have little in common with
the processes of actual life." This writer is inclined to believe, on the
basis of his experiments so far, that "experiments with small models of the
actual industrial mechanism are hardly appropriate for investigations in
the field of economic psychology. The essential point for the psychological
experiment is not the external similarity of the apparatus, but exclusively
the inner similarity of the mental attitude. The more the external
mechanism with which or on which the action is carried out becomes
schematized, the more the action itself will appear in its true character."
The second method we have described, viz., that of using as the test a real
sample of the work done, has certain very obvious advantages. On the other
hand, for the vocational test of this type to be at all significant, either
the sort of work involved in the occupation must be fairly uniform and
homogeneous in all its different circumstances (as in the case of
typewriting at dictation, or in the work of filing clerks, accountants,
etc.), or else there must be included a large number of samples
representing all the various unrelated sorts of work. Moreover, in neither
case is the test in any peculiar sense psychological. Such tests could
perhaps be best conducted by the employer himself. In fact, employment on
trial, which is a common method of selecting operatives and assistants, is
a time-honored form of this test, which is not necessarily improved either
by calling it psychological or by putting it in charge of a general expert
or by removing it to the laboratory.
The third form of procedure is full of all sorts of difficulties and
sources of error, many of which are, at the present stage of our knowledge,
irremediable. In selecting a new test which will involve the same mental
attitude and call for the exercise of the same psychological functions as
are needed in the work itself, we are handicapped by the unreliability of
the introspection of the examinee and also by our inadequate ability to
recognize, identify and classify psychological functions even when we are
confident that these are present. The statement of motormen that the
manipulation of a crank in connection with a strip of checkered paper makes
them feel quite as they do when guiding their cars through a crowded
thoroughfare is far from a guaranty "that the mental function which they
were going through had the greatest possible similarity with their
experience on the front platform of the electric car." It is much more
conceivable that the "mental attitude" referred to was merely the vague
feeling that "Something is happening now," "This keeps me busy," or "What a
nuisance this thing is." And even if we knew the mental functions involved,
as would be demanded by the vocational psychograph method, we are still a
long way from the time when we can exhibit even a single psychological test
and state just what function or functions its performance does or does not,
may or may not, involve. Indeed we do not even know what the various
distinct mental functions are, or whether, as a matter of fact, there are
such distinct functions.
After all, the miscellaneous, random, and purely empirical method of Lough,
Lahy and Woolley seems to be the most promising experimental procedure for
the immediate present, and perhaps for some time to come. This method is,
to be sure, but a rough, provisional and unanalyzed expedient. It calls for
long and patient cooperative labor. It does not at once afford us the
systematic scientific insight which we may wish we possessed. But it will
at least save us from the delusion that we already possess such insight,
and it should serve to check the fervent and semi-religious zeal that leads
us to mistake prophecy for service. Analysis and classification of the
results which this method yields are possible when the results are
accumulated in adequate measure.
It is essential that interest in this eminently practical use of the
psychological laboratory be sustained among those who are responsible for
the further promotion of its methods and problems. But it is undesirable
that public expectation should be strenuously directed toward the
laboratory until it has done more than the outlining of a series of
problems and the initiation of preliminary efforts toward their solution.
These specialized vocational methods, the miniature, the sampling, the
analogy, and the empirical procedure, constitute four definite and
promising instruments of research. They have yielded results of such
demonstrable practical value, in the selection of special types of workers
and in the detection of particular aptitudes and abilities, that the
application of selected mental tests has already come to play an important
role in the placement and training departments of a considerable number of
industrial and commercial concerns. While the more slowly developing
individual and vocational psychographs are being perfected, these
specialized vocational tests will not only serve the purposes of temporary
assistance and expedience, but the results derived from their intelligent
use and their further patient elaboration will contribute materially
toward the establishment of more complete and systematic technique.[7]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] In the Appendix is given a list of references to books and articles
which describe numerous tests worth trying out by the empirical method.
Instructions should be carefully followed so that results may be comparable
with those secured by other workers.