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The History of IQ Tests

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Introduction 

The prominent French psychologist, Alfred Binet, first developed the IQ test in response to France becoming a country with education for all children. Before, the only school children were the offspring of the well-to-do. France was now faced with the challenge of educating the masses, and they needed a way to separate those who needed special help from those who were average, and from those who were advanced. At the request of the French government, Binet and a colleague, Theodore Simon, took on the task of developing a test to measure the intelligence and potential of each child. Binet and Simon published their first test in 1905. Revisions to this test followed in 1908 and 1911.

The Early Standards

Through observations made during these early tests, they created the concept of mental age, which was:

  • If a 10-year-old child succeeded on the items appropriate for 10-year-olds but could not pass the questions appropriate for 11-year-olds, that child was said to have a mental age of 10.
  • Mental age did not necessarily correspond with chronological age. For example, if a 6-year-old child succeeded on the items intended for 9-year-olds, then that child was said to have a mental age of 9.

IQ Testing in USA

Henry Goddard, director of a New Jersey school for children with mental retardation, first brought the concept of IQ testing to the United States for use in testing people for mental retardation, also in the early 1900s. A Stanford psychologist, Lewis Terman, revised the test to expand its usability by adding questions appropriate for adults, and establishing new standards for average performance at each age. Terman’s first standardized test, published in 1916, was called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Terman also changed the concept of a mental age into a standardized IQ score, which is the approach still used today. 

IQ Tests Today

The history of IQ testing continues to the modern day, where the most widely used modern tests of intelligence are the Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (Kaufman-ABC). Each of these tests have a series of 10 or more subtests or sections of the main test in which all of the items are similar. Examples of subtests include vocabulary (“Define gregarious”), similarities, repeating digit strings of increasing length from memory, information processing, object assembly (putting together puzzles), mazes (tracing a path through a maze), and simple math problems.