Investigation into the mental abilities of the children of Trinidad

Abstract

My chief object was to investigate the innate mental abilities of the West Indian child. This I proposed doing by testing a sufficiently large sample of elementary school children from country districts with a large battery of tests measuring a wide range of abilities yet each designed to measure only one of them. The tests would fall into the a priori grouping of Non-Verbal, Space, Picture, Numerical, Verbal, Attainment. But the scores would be dealt with by the method of factorial analysis so that the actual way the tests of the battery should be grouped would be determined. This grouping might corroborate or refute the a priori grouping. This grouping would be the manifestation of the mental factors operative and, within a certain group of tests, one might be expected to be purer in the factor found than others. It was also thought that possibly factors not previously found with other populations might emerge. The factors might remain as statistical abstractions, but by scrutiny of those tests most representative of the factors it might be possible, as is frequently the case, to express them in psychological terms.