Submitted by Dr Helen Clegg

The next psychology research seminar, entitled “Howard Andrew Knox: The Neglected Pioneer of Psychological Testing at Ellis Island”, will be held on Wednesday 26th February 2014 from 3.30pm in F43. Refreshments will be available from 3.15pm.

The speaker will be Professor John Richardson from the Institute of Education Technology at The Open University. Howard Andrew Knox was one of the physicians employed by the U.S. Public Health Service at the Ellis Island immigration station in New York during the first part of the twentieth century. He and his colleagues were charged with assessing the health and in particular the intelligence of potential immigrants who were seeking entry to the United States. Knox made a key contribution in developing a wide range of new intelligence tests with which to test potential immigrants and in promoting the idea that any adequate measure of intelligence should be based on both verbal and nonverbal (“performance”) tests. Knox’s work represents a crucial link between the early endeavours of Francis Galton, Alfred Binet, and Henry Goddard (whose tests were mainly verbal in nature) and the later work of Rudolf Pintner, Robert Yerkes, and David Wechsler (who accepted the need for both verbal and nonverbal tests).