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Alfred Binet: Tests
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When psychologist Alfred Binet developed a test to measure the intellectual skills of French schoolchildren in 1904, he could not have possibly imagined how his research would change the world. In the last century, IQ and achievement tests have changed the face of education and employment all over the industrialized world. Given modern controversies regarding IQ testing, one might ask how Binet viewed intelligence. Binet equated intelligence with common sense. He called intelligence "judgment…good sense…the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances." Binet ... believed that intelligence is a combination of many skills - skills that are shaped heavily by the environment.
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French psychologist Alfred Binet developed the first intelligence test that successfully predicted academic success by using the concept of mental age. As mass education flooded French schools, the French Ministry of Public Instruction asked Binet in 1904 to develop a method of objectively identifying which students could not conform to formal education. The Ministry hoped that by identifying problem students and placing them in remedial classes, parents would pay more money for better schooling.
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The use of intelligence tests in the process of diagnosing mental retardation dates back to the turn of the 20th century, when Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed an intelligence test for that purpose. In the course of the implementation of universal education laws in France at that time, debates arose over the relative benefits and methods of educating schoolchildren with subnormal intelligence. As a result of this educational movement, Binet and Simon developed and in 1905 published what has come to be known as the first “practical” intelligence test (Sattler, 1988).
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In 1905 the French psychologist Alfred Binet published the first modern intelligence test, the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum. Along with his collaborator Theodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911, the last appearing just before his untimely death.
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A Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others.
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The work of Binet, Terman, and Wilhelm Stern paved the way for a method of classifying intelligence in terms of a standardized measure, with standardization ensured by the large number of individuals of various ages taking the test. German psychologist L. Wilhelm Stern was the first to coin the term intelligence quotient (IQ), a figure derived from the ratio of mental age to chronological age. Although Stern's method for determining IQ is no longer in common use, the term IQ is still used today to describe the results in several different tests. Today, an average IQ score is considered to be 100, with deviations based on this figure. Mentally retarded individuals usually score below 70 in IQ tests, and are classified according to functional ability through reference to a scale of low IQ scores.
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