This collection is comprised of correspondence, publications, lectures, articles about and examples of artist's work, a scrapbook of family related material, hand-drawn diagrams, and visual material in the form of photographs, slides, and fragile glass plate negatives.

Subject files are arranged alphabetically in boxes 1 through 9, and include papers, lectures, clippings, and other materials. These folders are listed as provided by Dr. Meier.

The bulk of this collection relates to the nearly forty-year career of Norman C. Meier with the University of Iowa Department of Psychology, where he developed tests to measure artistic aptitude, and a device to measure audience response.

Meier's University of Iowa Ph.D. dissertation, "The Use of Aesthetic Judgment in the Measurement of Art Talent," was written in 1926, during a time of development of other aptitude testing at the University of Iowa. The Iowa Testing Programs: the first fifty years, by Julia J. Peterson, describes the birth of a testing program within the University of Iowa College of Education in 1928. A related testing program that developed from the Iowa Testing Programs is the widely used American College Testing Program (ACT).

The "Meier Art Tests: I. Art Judgment " (1940) and "Meier Art Tests: II. Aestheitic Perception" (1963) and associated manuals and scoring sheets are located in Box 14a.