Stanford-Binet Test Essay

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.

The formulas were developed by Kuder and Richardson in 1937 to calculate the reliability/precision of a test by using a single form and a single test administration, without arbitrarily dividing the test into halves” (Drummond, Sheris, and Jones, 2016, p.100). When Jonathan took the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, he scored a 90 the first time he took this test, and a 94 the second time. This test measures a client’s reasoning ability and abstract thinking. While the test does not measure one’s ability to learn, it does give us a picture of how well he will do, academically. His scores fall within the average, meaning Jonathan can function intellectually. Even with the slight increase, he still falls in the average category, which is consistent with the reliability of the test. In order for a person to increase their IQ dramatically, he or she has to prepare by increasing their reading and consistent exposure to intellectual activities. The scores that Jonathan received on a differential aptitude test, especially a 49% in abstract reasoning and a 63% in mechanical reasoning, deemed to be extremely reliable and valid, as it relates to what Jonathan has verbalized about his interest. There is, indeed a correlation in these scores and his day to day performance in school, and his career

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

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).

Scott Barry Kaufman had a very difficult time growing up. He was about to repeat third grade, and was regularly bullied by kids who constantly reminded him that he will always be a failure (Kaufman, 2013). Finally, he took an intelligence test. Kaufman recounts, in his book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, how this one test drastically changed his life forever.

Alfred Binet (July 11, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first usable intelligence test, known at the time as the Binet test and today referred to as the IQ test His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911, the last appearing just before his death. Binet was born as Alfredo Binetti in Nice, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He was the only child of a physician father and an artist mother. His parents separated when he was young, and Binet then moved to Paris with his mother. He attended law school, and earned his degree in 1878.

Intelligence tests are inaccurate to measures true ability of a person because genes affect how a person responds to their surroundings, the tests cannot measure the person biological makeup or his true potential for being “smart”.

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.

Alfred Binet is a French psychologist who is known to have developed the very first practical intelligence test which became the basis for contemporary intelligence tests. He worked with a young medical student who was also his research assistant to come up with what became simply as the Binet-Simon Scale.

Over time, the tests were standardized to correspond to a priori conceptions of intelligence by including items that correlated well with school performance. Test items that differentiated between gender

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).

When a person utters the word “intelligence,” people tend to think of a genius like Albert Einstein developing some obscure equation that the great majority of the population will never understand. The problem with the definition of intelligence is that people relate intelligence to words like “genius” which require intelligence but do not have the same definition as intelligence. Often, people try to use related words to define intelligence, but these words are unable to define intelligence since many are only different levels of intelligence. While many definitions try to encompass the meaning of intelligence and various definitions describe a small part of intelligence, no definition completely explains intelligence, because

In early 1900s, the French government asked psychologist Alfred Binet to help decide which students were mostly likely to experience difficulty in schools. He was commissioned to identify students who needed educational assistance that the first IQ test was born.

Modern intelligence tests—including the current Stanford-Binet test no longer compute scores using the IQ formula. Instead, intelligence tests give a score that reflects how far the person's performance deviates from the average performance of others who are the same age. The thought of being the smartest person in the world intruiges many scientists. These two tests are just 2 of the many theorys people use to test intelligence.