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What is an IQ test and what does it really tell you? The year was 1904. Paris was being flooded with people from the provinces moving into the city, as well as immigrants from other countries. The schools were crowded. The French Ministry of Education came up with an idea to relieve the overcrowding by selecting only those students who were most likely to succeed. But how would they identify them? The Ministry asked Alfred Binet, a highly respected psychologist, to devise a test that would show a student's potential to succeed in school. Working with his partner, Theodore Simon, Binet devised a test based on his definition of intelligence as “the tendency to take and maintain a definite direction; the capacity to make adaptations for the purpose of attaining a desired end, and the power of autocriticism.” Binet specified three facilities as reflecting intelligence: judgmental, attentional, and reasoning. He then set about constructing test items that would signal the “haves” and the “have nots.” The “haves” purportedly would succeed in school; the “have nots” would not. In less abstract language, the questions dealt with vocabulary (“What does misanthrope mean?”), comprehension (“Why do people sometimes borrow money?”), and verbal relations (“What do an orange, an apple, and a pear have in common?”). These items became the first intelligence test. The success of the Binet-Simon test, known today as the Stanford-Binet Scale of Intelligence, is undisputed. The name change resulted from the efforts of Louis Terman of Stanford University to introduce the test to the United States as a predictive measure. To this day, psychometricians, those who measure “the duration and intensity of mental states or processes” (Oxford English Dictionary), use this instrument. Educators have long bought into the concept of normal, as defined by IQ (intelligence quotient) tests such as the Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (a similar test), and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT—an IQ test that was introduced in 1926 and is more typically called an achievement test). Normal is established through an empirical process. IQ was for many years a ratio between chronological age and mental age. Test-takers who score over 100, considered the norm, are recognized as being above average; the higher the score, the more gifted the person. The “scoring is now based on a statistical population distribution among age peers” (Yam, 1999). Activity Search for studies of IQ tests and student success. As a result of your research, do you think IQ tests are predictive of students' abilities in school and in life? Explain your views and discuss your findings with a group of your peers. Want to know more? Check out these sites: http://www.omnimag.com/IQtest/binet.html http://www.ericae.net/faqs/intell_t.htm http://edcen.ehhs.cmich.edu/~mnesset/binet2.html http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/Articles/Current%20Use.html http://mercury.sfsu.edu/~rsauzier/Binet.html Sources Stanford-Binet intelligence scale. Retrieved September 13, 1999, from http://www.richmond.edu/~capc/Binetmain.html. Yam, P. 1999, Winter. Intelligence considered. Scientific American, 9, 12–17.
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