Gustav Feingold on Intelligence and Immigrants in 1920’s Hartford

What did Gustave Feingold write on intelligence and immigrants in 1920s Hartford?

When approaching source detective question, my first course of action was to do a quick and dirty Google search.  I typed in all the important pieces in the hopes of yielding fast yet accurate results.  The top five of the 706,000 results looked accurate.

Unfortunately, none of them would allow me to read the full pdf without payment.  It was back to the drawing board.  I decided to look over the “Search strategies for sources” under “Resources & Tools” on Ed Reform commons site.

I started with the bold subtitle, If you know very little, because I knew little to nothing about the topic.  The site instructs us to use Wikipedia.  On the Wikipedia site, I searched for Gustave Feingold and yielded no results.  A couple of times, I misspelled his name and had to go back and check my question to make sure I had it right.  It’s impossible to find the information if there are mistakes in the search inquiry, so attention to detail is a must.   According to Wikipedia, my subject did not have a page.

 Yet, another dead-end.  I went back to the search strategies page and continued to work my way down the list.  The next recommended search engine was Trincoll.WorldCat.org.  I tried my luck.  In my first search I only filled in the author section.

I assumed that the topic of immigration would be easy to find among Feingold’s publications.  It wasn’t.  I did an advance search that included the word immigration and still nothing.

A conversation with Jack got me thinking about other places that Gustave’s immigration article could be.  We brainstormed about other relevant databases and decided to try Google Scholar.  I didn’t think that it would be a successful search, because Google was the first search engine I tried.  I did my quick and dirty search of “Gustave Feingold immigrant”.  The first result was a home run. It was exactly what I needed.

Jack explained that this branch of Google was geared toward scholarly work, so my results pool was more specific to my academic needs.  I clicked on the article title, and it lead me to American Psychological Association database.  With VPN, the educational psychology article can be downloaded for free.

In the article, “Intelligence of First Generation Immigrant Groups”, Gustave Feingold disproves and discredits the results of Army testing that portray the children of immigrants as intellectually inferior.  In fact, Gustave shows that their is very little difference in the intellectual ability of American-reared in comparison to their full blooded American counterparts.

Feingold, Gustave.  “Intelligence of the First Generation of Immigrant Groups (A Study and a Critique).”  Journal of Educational Psychology Feb. 1924: Print.