Modern intelligence testing began in【B1】______. French psychologist Binet based his test on the theory that intelligence increas

Good morning, everyone. My topic today is when and how intelligence testing started. Modern intelligence testing began with Alfred Binet in 1905. At that time the French government had recently passed a law requiring all children to attend school. And suddenly, teachers had a much wider range of students to deal with. So they had to be able to identify the students who needed special help. Binet was hired by the government to create a test to identify students who were below average academically. So, how did Binet go about trying to devise his test? He needed to have a premise or a theory on which to base the test, and the theory which he used is that intelligence increases with age. Intelligence increases with age: that the older one got, the smarter one got. So, if we tested a number of students on a number of tasks, we’d probably find that the older students would be able to do more tasks than the younger students, that they would be smarter, in a sense.
    So, Binet came up with a huge assortment of tasks that used different skills that he thought were important for success in school, such as good memory skills, reasoning skills, and verbal comprehension skills, those were all important for success in school. And then he age-graded these tasks. He said, for example, with the memory tasks that a five-year-old should be able to remember a list of, say, three words, and a seven-year-old should be able to remember five words, and so on. And depending on how many of these tasks a child could do, and they get progressively more difficult, when a child came to a point where they could no longer do any more tasks, at that point we say we’ve reached the child’s mental age. And this is a big concept in Binet’s theory, this idea of a mental age score depending on how many tasks a child could do.
    So, Binet figured out what the mental age for a normal child would be, in other words, how many tasks the average five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, and so on, could do. And if a seven-year-old could do all of the tasks that an average nine-year-old could do, we would say that that seven-year-old was very bright. If a five-year-old could only do the tasks that a three-year-old could do, we would say that that five-year-old was dull and would have some learning problems. So, this is how Binet used his test, to identify the students who were slow learners. And that’ s important to keep in mind: that the original purpose of his test was only to identify students who might have trouble in school.
    Well, after Binet’s death in 1911, Lewis Terman, who was then a professor at Stanford, he revised and extended Binet’s test for use with teenagers and adults, and this revised test came to be known as the Stanford-Binet, which is still in use today. The Stanford-Binet came up with the idea of a ratio measure of intelligence that we now call an IQ or an intelligence quotient. And the way that one determines an IQ is by dividing the child’s mental age, which as you remember depends on how many tasks they can do, dividing that by the chronological age, in years and months, and multiplying that by a hundred. So, by this formula, by definition, an average child has an IQ of a hundred.
    Now, let’s take an example: Say you have a nine-and-a-half-year-old child who has a mental age of seven. Let’s figure out his IQ by the formula. We divide seven by nine point five, which is about point seven four. Now, we multiply by one hundred, giving us a below-average IQ of seventy-four for this child. Again, the thing to remember about Binet’s test is that Binet designed it only to identify which children are going to have learning problems in school, and that seems to have gotten lost in our current usage of IQ tests. We now use them for job placement, and for other purposes for which the test was not created. This is not what Binet had in mind.