Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/456

450 gardening, cooking, carving, etc."). All comparisons or relations of interests and abilities are within this group, so that, for example, the statement that John Doe had interests in the high-school period distributed in the same order of strength as in the elementary-school period will mean that these seven interests had the same order in the two periods.

Such being the meanings of terms and the limitations of the field of inquiry I have measured:

 1. The permanence of interests from the last three years of the elementary-school period to the junior year of college or professional school. 2. The correlation or correspondence between interests in a given subject and ability therein at the elementary-school period. 3. The same relation at the high-school period. 4. The same relation toward the end of the college or professional course. 5. The same relation on the whole (this will be explained later). 6. The correlation or correspondence between interest in a given subject at the end of the elementary-school period (during its last three years) and ability in that subject toward the end of the college or professional-school period.

The results to be here reported are for one hundred individuals, juniors in Barnard College, Columbia College and Teachers College. These results are corroborated by a similar but less minute study of two hundred other individuals.

The original measures are the judgments of the hundred individuals themselves concerning the order of their interests in mathematics, history, literature and the rest, at each of the three periods. Each individual reported in writing in response to the following instructions:

Later he reported similarly his judgment as to his relative ability in each of these seven lines of activity in response to the following instructions: