Object Details
- Description
- Just before World War I, Stuart A. Courtis, a teacher at a private school for girls in Detroit, Michigan, developed the first widely available standardized tests of arithmetic. His goal was to measure the efficiency of entire schools, not the intellectual ability of a few students.
- Courtis went on to become supervisor of educational research in the Detroit public schools. There he developed a set of lesson cards in arithmetic for students in the third through eighth grades. The tests were originally published under his name by World Book Company.
- This is a teacher’s manual for a later edition of the drill cards. Courtis’s name does not appear. Courtis withdrew his arithmetic tests from the market in 1938 because he had come to doubt their validity.
- The manual was the property of Brooklyn school teacher L. Leland Locke.
- Reference:
- Kidwell, P.A., A. Ackerberg-Hastings and D. L. Roberts, Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 43–46.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
- maker
- Detroit Public Schools
- date made
- 1924
- Credit Line
- Gift of Grove City College
- Physical Description
- paper (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: .4 cm x 15.4 cm x 23 cm; 5/32 in x 6 1/16 in x 9 1/16 in
- Object Name
- pamphlet
