Statistical Analysis.

Education administrators collected data for decades before any general attempt was made to state what truths were revealed by their columns of figures; most superintendents counted children, income, expenditures, attendance, and passes and failures annually mainly to have a collection of official statistics. However, in the early twentieth century various mathematicians worldwide clarified and expanded techniques for studying relationships among sets of facts, and their work fired interest in the new field of statistical studies.

A New Discipline.

In the United States, Edward Thorndike became a leading proponent of the statistical measurement of social and economic facts, and he offered in 1902-1903, for the first time in this country, a course at Teachers College, Columbia University, called Education 108 — Practicum: the application of psychological and statistical method to education. Soon courses in statistical method were offered at Chicago (1910), Brown (1911-1912), Harvard (1912-1913), and scores...