Alfred Binet - Paper

One would assume that intelligence testing in the United States began with psychiatrists or government officials. It was actually a football coach who coached the University of South California at the start of the century. He

The Battelle Developmental Inventory – 2nd Edition (BDI-2) is psychoeducational testing instrument used in special education to assess developmental disorders in infants and young children. This paper looks into how the validity, reliability and norms for the BDI-2 were originally developed.

A further refinement of the Stanford-Binet scale and translation (for American culture) was published in 1916 by Lewis M. Terman, who adopted Stern’s proposal that an individual's intelligence level be measured as an intelligence quotient (I. Q.). The IQ score presumably represented an individual’s rate of mental development as a quotient, between "mental age" and actual "chronological age" times 100 (to remove the decimal). Terman's test, known colloquially as the Stanford-Binet test, formed the basis for modern intelligence

In regards to key developmental aspects of human growth in my life and as I integrate Erickson’s eight stages of development into my 48 years of life, I found that many of my transitional tasks were delayed, or not developed according to Erickson’s time frame. This might be due to the dysfunctional lifestyle, neglected childhood and promiscuous teenage years I had and it has taken me many years to develop my sense of identity, my sense of intimacy, and to change my behavior (Feldman, 2011). In the argument of Piaget he says that children at the age of three to five years think abstractly and this affects their motor

Verbal score: represented scores on subtests of vocabulary, comprehension, knowledge of general information and other verbal tasks

Testing has been used for centuries in many different ways, not just to test student intelligence levels. According to an article written in Time, the earliest form of a standardized test comes from China where government leaders would be tested on their knowledge of Confucius and poetry. The article continues with the inclusion of testing during the Industrial Revolution. The testing during this period took children who were not in school and measured their knowledge of subjects that students in schools learned. As time went on, more and more advances came to the testing scene. New products included a revised version of the test, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and professionals developed the test scanner by 1936. These inventions improved the time necessary to receive results from an IQ test. Today, tests, like the

Also, in the early 1900’s there were different intelligence test conducted mainly to “justify racial and ethnic discrimination”. According to the understanding race website, “The results of these intelligence tests were influential in shaping U.S. immigration policy that limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in justifying race-based segregation in public education, and U.S. conscription during World War I. Previously, the scientific debate centered largely on perceived differences in racial intelligence based on cranial size”. (Science: 1900s-1930s Race and Intelligence)

Binet was involved in creating one of the more recent forms of intelligence test, referred to as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A similar test is that formulated by Wechsler (Neisser et al. 1996). These led to the measure of IQ (“intelligence quotient”) being founded, where an individual’s “mental age is divided by their chronological age and multiplied by 100” (Gardner 2006, p. 3). The tests measure intelligence through verbal and non-verbal tasks, assessing scholastic aptitude, school achievement and specific abilities (Neisser et al. 1996, p. 78).

In the early 1900s, IQ test was originally developed by the French psychologist, Alfred Binet.

In 1904, a French psychologist (Alfred Binet) created the first intelligence test in order to help the French Ministry of Education segregate children that may have difficulty learning in a regular classroom. At that time, he did not know that his test would be the basis for IQ tests administered over 100 years later. He has a Stanford University psychologist, Lewis Terman, to thank for expanding his work and creating the Stanford-Binet intelligence test that took root in the United States in 1916 and is still popular today. However, along with its popularity came criticism. Critics see the current version of the Stanford - Binet test and other intelligence tests, despite attempts to make them culturally fair, as limiting to individuals who are not from the major social norm. They claim that cultural bias in test questions is why certain races do not perform as well as others on the test.

When Neisser (1979) claimed that the individual items in a Binet-type test functions like the individual dimensions of chairs, he was implying the effectiveness of prototypical intelligence measurements. According to him, a person who scores highly in tests is also likely to be good in school and other academic areas. Such correlation convinces the pychometrician that the test acts as the unit of measurement with regards to similarity to the original prototype. However, according to the Roschian concept, the only way to measure intelligence similarity is by resemblance to the proper prototype, which is done best through cumulating similarities over different dimensions. Therefore, the only possible way to measure intelligence similarity is

     Scientific research in child development flourished from the early 1900’s. One major stimulus was the introduction (1916) by the American psychologist Lewis Terman of the test known today as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. This test led to a number of studies about children’s intellectual development. In the 1920’s scientists at more than a dozen leading universities began large-scale observational studies of children and heir families; these included the Berkeley Growth Study at the University of California (started in 1929 and still active today), the Fels Growth Study at Antioch College, and the Harvard Growth Studies. All used the longitudinal method, in which the same children are observed and tested at over a specific time period (The Volume Library 1990: Volume 2).

In 1905 Binet and Simon tested their measurements on another fifty children whom their school teachers considered to be of average intelligence for their ages. This test was to enable Binet to examine the levels of intelligent behaviors between children of the same age. Some of the tests on Binets scale were very simple, including asking a child to follow the direction of movement of a lighted match, and then maybe slightly harder was to repeat back a three digit sequence of numbers or sentences. There were a few harder tests involved which would require a child to make a sentence out of maybe three or four words, or to reproduce a drawing from memory.

His concept involved the idea that certain mental tasks are appropriate to certain ages, such as the ability to recite the names of the months: while expected of a ten year old, such ability would be rare in a three year old. Binet quantified intelligence as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ): the ratio of mental age to chronological age, multiplied by 100. Reasoning that low intelligence stemmed from improper development, Binet envisioned the test as a first step in treatment: a diagnostic instrument used to detect children with inadequate intelligence in order to treat them using "mental orthopedics."

Before the 1950s, most educators and school systems tended to follow Louis Terman’s example and based most decisions about gifted individuals on IQ and scholastic achievement scores. Standardized group intelligence tests, such as California Test of Mental Maturity, were often used to determine IQ. In these tests, educators were looking for exceptional ability in verbal or performance IQ, or a combination of the two. For the final identification, individual IQ tests such as the Wechsler scales and the Stanford Binet were used. Most school systems around this time considered an IQ of 130 or above to fall in the "gifted" range. This information comes from a book by Frederick B. Tuttle, Laurence A. Becker, and Joan A. Sousa (48).