Intelligence Testing : An Individual 's General Mental Ability

When comparing Alfred Binet and Lewis Terman on their approaches to intelligence testing there are some similarities amongst the two. One such similarity would be regarding content. Alfred Binet’s approach to intelligence testing consisted of tests that ranged in difficulty levels from easy to hard. These tests required one to demonstrate his or her own cognitive ability, decision making, and verbal skills. Lewis Terman’s approach to intelligence testing was an updated version of Binet’s. Terman also used cognitive ability, decision making, and verbal skills in his testing; however, he added mathematics, attention span, and processing skills. However, their purposes for intelligence testing were quite different from one another. Alfred

When one speaks of intelligence or how bright another person is, the often quoted figure is the IQ or intelligence quotient. It is the most often used standard of how smart a person is. This paper shall look at what intelligence tests measure, how the IQ tests measure intelligence and interrogate their history. It shall then apply the tests to school policy and hence evaluate their validity.

Sir Francis Galton (1869, 1883) quantified traits that were assumed to be correlated, and developed the first comprehensive test of intelligence. By the end of the 19th century, the foundation was laid for modern day intelligence testing (Wicket, 1998). In 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet published the first modern intelligence test to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum (Neiser, et al. 1996). Shortly thereafter in 1908 and 1911, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon published revisions of the Binet intelligence test (Wicket). The mental age concept was adopted to express the results in adequate units. The concept is based on an individual’s performance in comparison to the average performance of individuals in a specific chronological age group (Kaplin, & Saccuzzo).

For the longest time, IQ tests have been considered to be absolute indicators of human intelligence. Massive disparities were noted in the tests conducted to check the

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

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).

Each theory of intelligence has not only a different method of testing intelligence, but also a different definition of intelligence, which each creator ascribes to. Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (Terman, 1916), or IQ tests as they are commonly referred to as, are currently one of the most widely used tools for intelligence measurement, however, research suggests they are a poor predictor of future academic success for particular cultural groups (Gardner, 1993). In one of the largest neurocognitive-based intelligence studies performed to date, it was revealed through the observation of neuroimaging data that IQ scores alone were not likely to indicate a fundamental intellectual ability because intelligence is composed of multiple anatomically distinct components (Hampshire, Highfield, Parkin, & Owen, 2012). Considering this development, it would appear that IQ tests are only measuring one subsection of intelligence, located in the frontoparietal cortex (Gray, Chabris, & Braver, 2003; Hampshire, Highfield, Parkin, & Owen, 2012). In order to provide analogous statistics to base research upon, it is vital to create multifaceted, culturally sensitive measurements because cultures differ greatly in the emphasis they place on certain aspects of intelligence (Sternberg, Grigorenko, & Kidd, 2005).

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.

In the earlier year of psychology and research there had been ways on how to calculate different subjects that would be used to portray the demographics of social groups. One of which is intelligence testing. Looking back in the history of intelligence testing, there had been many studies conducted on intelligence that indicated some strong theories on what determines intelligence. The most controversial involving race and ethnicity. Modern research has made much advancements to say that these researchers did not realize was that there was much flaw in their procedures. Not to mention that the obliviousness may have been a result of subjectivity. These claims can be invalidated by many studies with revealing the

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."

For this task, Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon began developing a number of questions that focused on things such as attention, memory and problem solving skills which was not taught in schools. Using these types of questions, Binet determined which ones served as the best predictors of school success. In 1905, Alfred Binet published the first modern intelligence test. It was designed to identify children who needed special help in coping with their school.

Binet. Another key individual in the development of intelligence is Alfred Binet, who was a very influential psychologist of the early twentieth century. He was a French psychologist who is known especially for his work with intelligence and is remembered as the father of the first intelligence test (Binet, 1903). He was a self-taught psychologist who was studying medicine (but did not finish his medical studies) and later shifted into psychology because it was much an interest to him (Zusne, 1957). He was interested in the development of his children and in 1903 he published a book L’étude expérimentale de I’intelligence (Binet, 1903) which included empirical data of the observations he made with his children and an extensive