Object Details
maker
Detroit Public Schools
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
Credit Line
Gift of Grove City College
date made
1924
ID Number
2011.3051.01
nonaccession number
2011.3051
catalog number
2011.3051.01
Object Name
pamphlet
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
place made
United States: Michigan, Detroit
See more items in
Medicine and Science: Mathematics
Science & Mathematics
Arithmetic Teaching
Data Source
National Museum of American History
Subject
Mathematics
Link to Original Record
Record ID
nmah_1408188