The idea of IQ / Russell Marks.

  • Marks, Russell.
Date:
[1981], ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The idea of IQ / Russell Marks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    scale of intelligence in 1905. The Binet-Simon scale was soon translated and revised into English, one of the earliest being Henry H. Goddard's 1910 Revision and the best-known being Lewis M. Terman's 1916 Stanford Revision. While Binet never formulated what he considered an adequate definition of intelligence, he insisted that intelligence was not a fixed quantity and that his tests did not measure hereditary intelligence. In response to those who claimed intelligence was a fixed quantity, he wrote ; . . . some recent philosophers appear to have given their moral support to the deplorable verdict that the intelligence of a child is fixed quality. ... We must protect and act against this brutal pessimism. ... A child's mind is like a field for which an expert farmer has advised a change in the method of culti¬ vating, with the result that in place of desert land, we now have a harvest. It is in this particular sense, that one which is significant, that we say that the intelligence of children may be in¬ creased. One increases that which con¬ stitutes the intelligence of a school . child, namely, the capacity to learn, to improve with instruction.^ The remarkable thing about America's most used revision of the Binet tests, the Stanford Revision, was that while Binet's tests measured acquired intelligence in France, they measured essentially innate intelligence in America. How could the same, translated question and a similar, although somewhat revised, set of questions measure ac¬ quired intelligence in one country and innate intelli¬ gence in another? The key, of course, lay not in the questions asked but in what it was purported that the questions measured. For Lewis M. Terman, the author of the Stanford-Binet, the tests essentially measured innate intelligence. Borrowing from William Stern, a German psychologist, Ter- -18-