Talent Census

Vital to the overnight build-up of the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II were the new aptitude tests that transformed bakers and brokers into pilots, bombardiers and navigators. The tests downplayed such culture-linked criteria as college degrees and IQs. Instead, they matched raw abilities to the skills needed.

The chief designer of those tests, Harvard-trained Psychologist John C. Flanagan, is now professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the nation's top testmakers, e.g., his nonprofit American Institute for Research tests prospective pilots for U.S. and foreign airlines. Experience has persuaded him that thousands of Americans are miscast in wrong careers, and so he is busy with a far-reaching cure: Project TALENT, "the first scientifically planned national inventory of human talents."

Ability Pinpointed. With hefty support from the U.S. Office of Education, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation TALENT has already tested 440,000 high school students --one out of every 20 in the U.S.--and begun tracking their career orbits for the next 25 years. The purpose is to pinpoint the students' abilities, trace the impact (or nonimpact) of U.S. education on their development, and follow their failures and successes through the 19805. Last week Flanagan issued the first of many progress reports: Design for a Study of American Youth (Houghton Mifflin; $5).

Shortcomings Isolated. In a sophisticated sampling of the nation's 26,000 high schools, Flanagan & Co. picked 1,353 Public, private and parochial schools of all sizes, from Alaska to Manhattan, to get a thorough blanketing of high school youth from every conceivable background. For two days in 1960, kids at these schools tackled 23 newly designed aptitude and achievement tests, covering everything from creativity to visualization in three dimensions. Brief themes revealed their interests and ambitions, from welding to the U.S. presidency. Questionnaires probed personalities and family backgrounds, from papa's income to the size of the living-room library.

In return, Flanagan got 5,000,000 cards packed with one billion bits of information, which is now being organized and analyzed by Pitt's computers. Among preliminary discoveries: >English teaching is slipshod: only one out of 100 kids produced a five-minute theme without mistakes in grammar, spelling or usage.

>Reading comprehension is low: the average U.S. twelfth-grader understands only 67% of what he reads in Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins, only 28% of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus. The rate for magazines is 78% for Modern Screen and Silver Screen, 54% for the Saturday Evening Post, 35% for TIME and 28% for the Atlantic.

>U.S. schools need more individual pace-setting to unleash the gifted: about 30% of ninth-graders scored higher on general information tests than average twelfth-graders. > Reviewing is an overlooked art: tenth-and eleventh-grade girls knew less about science than girls in ninth grade.

As TALENT'S guinea pigs report in at one, five, ten-and 20-year intervals, the schools will be able to see how they could have done a better job in developing individual abilities. But Project TALENT is only a means of measuring U.S. education. As always, better teaching requires better teachers.

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