J. P. Guilford - Guilford's Career

Guilford's Career

Guilford graduated from the University of Nebraska before studying under Edward Titchener at Cornell. In 1938 Guilford became the 3rd President of the Psychometric Society, following in the footsteps of its founder Louis Leon Thurstone and of EL Thorndike who held the position in 1937. Guilford held a number of posts at Nebraska and briefly at the University of Southern California. In 1941 he entered the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant Colonel and served as Director of Psychological Research Unit No. 3 at Santa Ana Army Air Base. There he worked on the selection and ranking of aircrew trainees as the Army Air Force investigated why a sizable proportion of trainees was not graduating.

Promoted to Chief of the Psychological Research Unit at the U.S. Army Air Forces Training Command Headquarters in Fort Worth, Guilford oversaw the "Stanines Project," which identified eight specific intellectual abilities crucial to flying a plane. (Stanines, now a common term in educational psychology, was coined during Guilford's project). Over the course of World War II, Guilford's use of these eight factors in the development of the two-day Classification Test Battery was significant in increasing graduation rates for aircrew trainees.

Discharged as a full colonel after the war, Guilford joined the Education faculty at the University of Southern California and continued to research the factors of intelligence. He published widely on what he ultimately named the Structure of Intellect theory, and his post-War research identified a total of 90 discrete intellectual abilities and 30 behavioral abilities.

Guilford's 20 years of research at Southern California were funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Education of the former Health, Education and Welfare Department, and the Office of Naval Research. Although Guilford's subjects were recruits at the Air Force Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base, San Antonio, the Office of Naval Research managed this research.

Guilford's post-war research led to the development of classification testing that, modified in different ways, entered into the various personnel assessments administered by all branches of the U.S. Armed Services. Thus, in a generic manner, all U.S. Military qualifying exams of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s may be said to have descended from Guilford's research.

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