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Alfred Binet
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Intelligence testing began in earnest in France, when in 1904 psychologist Alfred Binet was commissioned by the French government to find a method to differentiate between children who were intellectually normal and those who were inferior. The purpose was to put the latter into special schools. There they would receive more individual attention and the disruption they caused in the education of intellectually normal children could be avoided. Read more…
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Alfred Binet (1857-1911) was a French psychologist who was interested in thestudy of thinking and mental processes. As the director of physiological psychology at the Sorbonne, he was asked by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to develop a method of identifying children who were too so far below average in intelligence that they could not be educated in ordinary public schools. In 1905, Binet and his colleague, Theodore Simon, developed a series ofgraded tasks that could be performed by children of average intelligence at different ages. During the next six years, until his death, Binet worked to refine this scale to produce a score that represented the mental age of the child.
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In 1905 Alfred Binet and Theodor Simon devised a very different sort of test that was considered a breakthrough in measuring intelligence, and still forms the basis for much current IQ testing. As a young psychologist Binet tried out many of the new tests devised by Galton and Cattell on his two young daughters. He found that while his daughters and their friends had average reaction times that were three times as long as adults, they were ... much more variable: on some trials the children performed at a similar level to the adults, but on other trials they would take much longer. Binet concluded that the difference lay not in mental speed but in the children's difficulty in consistently paying attention. On tests of perceptual and sensory abilties the children's performance often equalled that of adults. The fact that children were capable of performinmg as well as adults on such sensory tests led Binet to question the idea that they measured intellectual capacity.
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How did Alfred Binet create the first intelligence test? Fortunately, for the millions of children with learning disorders, Binet had spent "quality time" with his daughters. He asked them questions and queried how they solved them. This led to an understanding of individual differences in mental performance, and most importantly, that not all thought processes followed the same course.Using these observations, along with a smattering of good-old-fashioned logic, Binet was able to argue against the prevailing view that 'lack' of intellect in certain fields was an "illness". His discovery of different kinds of memory led to a government appointment to develop tests intended to identify areas of weakness in school children. In association with Theodore Simon, Binet identified developmental achievements levels expected of normal children.
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Alfred Binet was born in Nice, France, on July 8, 1857. He went to Paris to study law, and began a career in law. Around 1878, Binet found himself grippedby the studies of hypnosis performed by Jean Charcot, a French neurologist working at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Charcot's work inspired Binet to abandon his law career and enter into further study of medicine and science. Ultimately, he earned a doctorate in natural science, and began work as a research associate in a laboratory at the Sorbonne in 1891. Binet rose through theranks to become assistant director in 1892, and then director in 1895.
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Alfred Binet is best remembered as the developer of the first useful test for measuring intelligence. Along with Théodore Simon, Binet developed the Binet-Simon Scale, the forerunner of modern IQ tests. Binet's original goal for the scale was relatively modest and very practical. In the early years of the 1900s, the French government had just enacted laws requiring that all children be given a public education. For the first time, mentally "subnormal" children—those who today might be called mentally retarded or developmentally disabled—were to be provided with special classes, rather than simply ignored by the schools. However, this raised the issue of how to identify which children would benefit from special programs.
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Alfred Binet