Review of: Educational measurement

Reviews the book Educational Measurement by E. F. Lindquist (Ed.) (1951; . According to the preface, the purpose of this volume is to provide a "comprehensive handbook and textbook on the theory and technique of educational measurement." In addition the preface points out that this volume was inspired by the fact that there existed no suitable reference work that could be used in advanced courses in educational measurement at the graduate level. The reviewer maintains that it is extremely difficult to review a work so encyclopedic in character and so heterogeneous in authorship--because of the varying quality of different parts of the work, and because different authors have different audiences in mind and hence write at different levels of difficulty. The reviewer also believes that difficulty is enhanced in the present volume, where chapters vary from the platitudinous to the profound. Of course, what is a platitude to one still may be a profundity to another. The part of the volume which seems to come closest to the stated purposes is Part 3 on "Measurement Theory." The five authors of this section reflect in their writing a level of scholarship far above that found in most of the rest of the volume. The chapter by Irving Lorge on "The Fundamental Nature of Measurement" is particularly notable and represents a real contribution to the understanding of the philosophical problems underlying psychological measurements. Robert Thorndike's chapter on "Reliability" provides a well-organized account of the topic.