The measurement of intelligence : an explanation of and a complete guide for the use of the Stanford revision and extension of the Binet-Simon intelligence scale / by Lewis M. Terman.

  • Lewis Terman
Date:
[1916], ©1916
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The measurement of intelligence : an explanation of and a complete guide for the use of the Stanford revision and extension of the Binet-Simon intelligence scale / by Lewis M. Terman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    72/394 (page 48)
    In order to secure this result Binet found that his data seemed to require the location of an individual test in that year where it was passed by about two thirds to three fourths of unselected children. It was in the assembling of the tests that the most serious faults of the scale had their origin. Further investigation has shown that a great many of the tests were misplaced as much as one year, and several of them two years. On the whole, the scale as Binet left it was decidedly too easy , in the lower ranges, and too difficult in the upper. As a result, the average child of 5 years was caused to test at not far from 6 years, the average child of 12 years not far from ]1. In the Stanford revision an effort has been made to correct this fault, along with certain other generally recognized imperfections. Some avowed limitations of the Binet tests. The Binet tests have often been criticized for their unfitness to perform certain services which in reality they were never meant to render. This is unfair. We cannot make a just evaluation of the scale without bearing in mind its avowed limita- tions. For example, the scale does not pretend to measure the entire mentality of the subject, but only general intelli- gence. 'There is no pretense of testing the emotions or the will beyond the extent to which these naturally display ~ themselves in the tests of intelligence. The scale was not designed as a tool for the analysis of those emotional or volitional aberrations which are concerned in such mental disorders as hysteria, insanity, etc. These conditions do not present a progressive reduction of intelligence to the in- fantile level, and in most of them other factors besides in- telligence play an important role. Moreover, even in the normal individual the fruitfulness of intelligence, the direc- tion in which it shall be applied, and its methods of work