Educational Testing
Desiring to create an academic competition for Iowa students, he developed a set of tests in 1929. These evolved into the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, an exam for elementary and middle school students, as well as the Iowa Tests of Educational Development for high schoolers. Despite their name, they are used nationwide, especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind legislation. Due to their success, he founded the not-for-profit Measurement Research Center on the Iowa campus to score these tests, which was later acquired by Westinghouse, NCS, and its present owner, Pearson PLC.
In 1959, he introduced the ACT, an examination to test students on practical knowledge rather than cognitive reasoning examined on the SAT. The ACT is still in widespread use today, and is headquartered in Lindquist's hometown, Iowa City, Iowa. Although it is now administered by the College Board, the competing organization to ACT, Lindquist developed the first National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Tests.
Lindquist was on the committee that developed the GED, which evolved during World War II as a way to grant academic credit to servicemen.
Read more about this topic: Everett Franklin Lindquist
Famous quotes containing the words educational and/or testing:
“If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)