Psychology
Lewis Terman
Lewis Terman was an influential American psychologist known for his work in intelligence testing and the development of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He is also recognized for his longitudinal study of gifted children, known as the "Termites." Terman's research significantly contributed to the field of educational psychology and the understanding of intelligence and giftedness.
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eBook - PDFPsychological Testing
A Practical Introduction
- Thomas P. Hogan(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Engineered by Lewis Terman of Stanford University, the Stanford Revision involved new items (nearly doubling the original number), new tryout research, an ambitious national norming program, and the first widespread use of the ratio IQ—altogether a blockbuster. A researcher looking back on it today would scoff. At the time, it was like the first jet-powered aircraft, the first man on the moon, the first smart phone. Within a relatively short time, the Stanford–Binet became the benchmark definition of human intelligence, a mainstay of clinical practice, and perhaps the most distinctive symbol of psychology’s contri- bution to the modern world. Thus began the period of flowering. One of the most profoundly influential events in the history of testing was development of the first widely used group-administered intelligence test. This occurred in the context of psy- chologists’ efforts to aid in processing the tidal wave of military recruits as the United States entered World War I in 1917. Arthur Otis, as part of his doctoral work under Lewis Terman (of Stanford–Binet fame), undertook creation of a group-administered form of the Stanford–Binet. Otis’s work eventuated in the Army Alpha and Beta, verbal and nonverbal versions, respectively, administered to nearly 2 million military personnel. In 1918, the tests were made available for general use as the Otis Group Intelligence Scale. We will examine the lineal descendant of this test, the Otis–Lennon School Ability Test, in Chapter 9. The Stanford–Binet and Otis tests established the use of a single score to represent intelli- gence. The major challenge to this practice arose in the work of L.L. Thurstone (1938), who maintained that there were seven (more or less) different dimensions of human intelligence. Thurstone’s work spawned a host of multiscore intelligence tests in this period.
eBook - PDF- Ken Richardson(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Demands for immigration laws soon followed. Lewis Terman, a professor at Stanford University, developed another translation of Binet’s test in 1916. He enthused over the way it could help clear ‘high-grade defectives’ off the streets, curtail ‘the production of feeblemindedness’, and eliminate crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. By using his IQ test, he said, we could ‘preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it’. Binet’s screen for a specific category thus became scores of the genetic worth of people in general. ‘People do not fall into two well defined groups, the “feeble minded” and the “nor- mal”’, Terman said. ‘Among those classed as normal vast individual differ- ences exist in original mental endowment.’ He, too, called for eugenic reproduction controls, which soon followed. Galton’s programme had found its measure. Mass Testing Terman’s test was applied to individuals, one at a time. During World War I, however, the US Army wanted to test recruits in large numbers from many different backgrounds. A group led by Robert Yerkes constructed two pencil- and-paper tests: one for those who could read and write English; the other for those who could not. These were quite ingenious, including tasks like tracing through a maze, completing a picture with a part missing, and comparing geometrical shapes. Up to 60 recruits could be tested at a time, taking 40–50 minutes. In Army Mental Tests, published in 1920, Clarence Yokum and Robert Yerkes claimed that the test was ‘definitely known . . . to measure native intellectual ability’. These group tests set the scene for mass IQ testing in populations generally, and for the spread of the ideology underlying it. Up to the early 1930s the IQ message became useful in the USA in the passing of compulsory sterilisation laws, immigration laws, and the banning of ‘inter-racial’ marriage. Hitler’s ministers in Nazi Germany were impressed by America’s IQ testing regimes, TESTING, TESTING 7
eBook - ePub- Paul Kline(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
These tests, indeed, were developed into what was to become one of the most widely used individual intelligence tests — the Terman Merrill Test (Terman and Merrill, 1960, for the latest edition), also known as the Stanford Binet Scale. At about the same time, in an even more more significant study, Spearman (1904) reported the first factor analysis of human abilities. This claimed that all human abilities were explicable in terms of g, a general ability factor and a factor specific to that ability. Spearman, the founder of the London School of psychology, which includes some of the great figures in psychometrics (Burt, Cattell and Eysenck to name the most famous or notorious), developed this notion of intelligence as a general factor (Spearman, 1927) and it is this factor (or factors, as shall be seen) which most modern intelligence tests attempt to measure. Although Spearman's tetrad method of factor analysis was by modern standards crude, in respect of parsimoniously explaining the variance in a correlation matrix, and although, as was discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 on factor analysis, the technique has become highly sophisticated, yet the factors extracted from matrices of correlations between measures of ability still include a recognisable general factor. That is why modern intelligence tests still aim to measure g. DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE AND THE DEFINITION OF G Jensen (1980) has pointed out that there are a huge number of different definitions of intelligence both among psychologists and among non-specialists. Sharp, acute, quick are often terms used in the definitions, as are their opposites: dim, sluggish, slow. However, such verbal definitions or descriptions are too vague to be scienjpgically useful. boring (1923) attempted to get round this difficulty by defining intelligence as what intelligence tests measure
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