The organismic age concept.

Abstract

The Organismic Age concept has had considerable appeal to elementary teachers. Perhaps one reason for this is the fact that its proponents have put it forward in a setting of enlightened school practices. In this paper we are not concerned with these practices but with the validity of the OA concept.Long since accepted is the idea that a child's readiness for reading, arithmetic, third-grade science, and so on is a function of his mental development, total mental development. In this, the MA is the most important single component. But social development, emotional maturity, before-school experiences, language development, motor coordination, and perhaps other factors are also important. The OA is an average of age scores of mental data and age scores of anatomical and physiological data, which hereafter we shall call physical data. Commonly, OA is the average of mental age, reading age, dental age, grip age, metacarpal age, vital capacity age, height age, and weight age, although there is no hard and fast set of component measures. In a sense it combines measures of what is commonly called mental growth and measures of whatwe may call physical growth; and, because of the disproportionate number of measures of the latter kind, the average, OA, is weighted heavily in that direction. It is with the feasibility in school practice of making prediction of achievement, determining readiness, appraising achievement of pupils in terms of their anatomical and physiological development, as well as in terms of measures of mental development that we are concerned. Can we make better predictions or interpretations (which amounts to the same thing) by so doing?Obviously the first questions one would ask in this connection are: Are measures of physical growth related (1) to mental growth, and (2) to academic achievement? Moreover, if found to be related, are they related to an extent that makes any practical difference?They are, of course, related in a spurious way. All the measures that go into OA are related one to another in this way. Any growth process requires time. Childhood is the period of growth. Most of the growth functions begin in early childhood, even before birth,

Chapter I: Physical Growth

“…Concepts of growth and what they mean for the classroom teacher were dealt with by Blommers and others(33),Jackson and Kelly (164),Olson (247),Olson and Lewellen (248), and Themen(310). Krogman(181) published an article on physical development and growth in relation to student success which may be of especial interest to educators.Tuddenham and Snyder (314) recently published a study of the physical growth of California boys and girls from birth to 18 years.…”

Note on the organismic age concept.

“…In the March 1955 issue of this journal the authors, together with Knief, presented data showing that the use of height age, weight age, and dental age contributed practically nothing to a least squares estimate of either reading or arithmetic achievement when combined with mental age (1). That is to say, mental age alone provided about as accurate an estimate of achievement in these areas as a least squares combination of mental age and these three other age scores.…”

“…In such multiple correlation analyses the component age scores are, of course, automatically ideally weighted before being combined. In the formation of the OA score, on the other hand, the component age scores are given equal weights 1 since the OA score is the simple unweighted average of the component age scores. Because of the nature of the relationships among these age scores it follows that the correlation between educational achievement and OA must necessarily be considerably lower than that between achievement and MA alone.…”

“…To show how marked this attenuation actually becomes, Formulas [1], [2], and [4] were applied to the products matrix used in the least squares analysis reported in our previous paper. In this paper the correlation between R and M was reported as .645.…”

Maturation: The evolving structure of the organism.

“…From this partial list of maturational * The question of whether there is a general "going-togetherness" in the dimensions of psychological and physical growth is in debate. Olson and Hughes (106) interpret their longitudinal data as supporting an integrated organismic coherence of growth functions, while Blommers, Knief, and Stroud (10) find no supporting evidence in their statistical analysis of cross-sectional data on weight, mental age, and dental age. Hanley (53) and Krogman (76) have advanced the interesting idea that maturity level and somatotype can influence the status of psychological functions indirectly through self-evaluations and the impacts of positive-negative evaluations from others.…”