STAGES IN HUMAN MENTAL GROWTH

McCall's 1988 article in this journal criticizing some of Epstein's studies of brain and mind growth is shown to suffer from two main flaws. First, he was not aware of the need for analysis in terms of concurrences among studies rather than standard statistical analyses of individual studies. Second, he did not use increment spans appropriate for the data. He also wrongly claimed that Epstein advocated changes in educational policies and practices without caveats that carefully labeled these as suggestions for working hypotheses to be tested in the schools. Finally, his criticisms of the brain growth stages had already been invalidated in a 1986 article by Epstein which he did not cite.