 |
History of Intelligence Testing (Page 4)
Significant revisions to the original tests and doubts came about later on. Very soon after the early 1910's, a man named Lewis Terman rose to prominence. With the publication of The Measurement of Intelligence, he introduced the Stanford-Binet intelligence test that became widely used in the United States to determine a person's "intellectual ability." With these credentials, Terman was immediately invited during World War I to help the United States military sort out and categorize the multitudes of recruits destined for Europe's murderous trenches. He and one of his graduate students, Author Otis, helped develop the Army Alpha and Beta tests to determine what functions and duties best suited a soldier. In an eighteen month period they tested and classified over 1.7 million inductees. The Beta test differed from the Alpha in that it was developed for illiterate and foreign-language soldiers. By avoiding the use of language and employing only gestures and pantomime, the testers felt that they had a culture-free test. In addition to his work for the U.S. army, Terman created the Stanford Achievement Test for use in his longitudinal study of gifted children. One significant outcome of this study being the emergence of the famous term "intelligence quotient," or "I.Q." Terman also advocated "a mental test for every child," and in 1919, the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, noting the capacity of intelligence tests to classify large numbers of people, awarded Terman a grant to develop a national intelligence test. Within a year 400,000 tests were available for use in public elementary schools.
  
|
|
|
|
