Use of the Terman-Merrill abbreviated scale on the 1960 Stanford-Binet Form L-M on Negro elementary school children of the Southeastern United States

Consideration was given to the degree of precision which would have been lost had the abbreviated scale only been administered in a normative study of the 1960 Stanford-Binet Form L-M on 1800 Negro elementary school children from 5 Southeastern states (Kennedy, Van De Riet, & White, 1961). A Pearson product-moment correlation of .99 was obtained between the mental age scores on the full and abbreviated scales for the 1800 Ss stratified according to age, grade, sex, socioeconomic status, and community size and randomized within these limits. There was little variation from grades 1 to 6, with a mean IQ of 80.7, a SD of 12.4. This low IQ in a homogeneous population is one explanation for the high correlation. With these Ss little precision is gained from the use of the full scale over the abbreviated scale of the 1960 Stanford-Binet Form L-M.