a list might be composed of the following words:  north, white, spent, block, river, winter, Sunday, letter, thank, and best.  A similar list could be taken from the scale for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth grade.  For example, the words which have approximately the same difficulty,—­seventy-three percent to be spelled correctly by the class for the sixth grade,—­read as follows:  often, stopped, motion, theater, improvement, century, total, mansion, arrive, supply.  The great value of such a measuring scale, including as it does the thousand words most commonly used, is to be found not only in the opportunity for comparing the achievements of children in one class or school with another, but also in the focusing of the attention of teachers and pupils upon the words most commonly used.[25]

One of the fields in which there is greatest need for measurement is English composition.  Teachers have too often thought of English composition as consisting of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like, and have ignored the quality of the composition itself in their attention to these formal elements.  A scale for measuring English composition derived by Dr. M.B.  Hillegas,[26] consisting of sample compositions of values ranging from 0 to 9.37, will enable the teacher to tell just how many pupils in the class are writing each different quality of composition.  The use of such a scale will tend to make both teacher and pupil critical of the work which is being done not only with respect to the formal elements, but also with respect to the style or adequacy of the expression of the ideas which the writer seeks to convey.  Probably in no other field has the teacher been so apt to derive his standard from the performance of the class as in work in composition.  Even though some teachers find it difficult to evaluate the work of their pupils in terms of the sample compositions given on the scale, much good must come, it seems to the writer, from the attempt to grade compositions by such an objective scale.  If such measurements are made two or three times during the year, the performance of individual pupils and of the class will be indicated much more certainly than is the case when teachers feel that they are getting along well without any definite assurance of the amount of their improvement.

In one large school system in which the writer was permitted to have the principals measure compositions collected from the sixth and the eighth grades, it was discovered that almost no progress in the quality of composition had been accomplished during these two years.  This lack of achievement upon the part of children was not, in the opinion of the writer, due to any lack of conscientious work upon the part of teachers, but, rather, developed out of a situation in which the whole of composition was thought of in terms of the formal elements mentioned above.  The Hillegas scale, together with the values assigned to each of the samples, is given below.