Intelligence and Intelligence Testing
The debate on the merits and validity of intelligence testing has been going on for many years. Intelligence testing was the creation of Alfred Binet in France. He was asked by the French government to devise a test to separate the slow learners from the gifted children. The Simon-Binet scale was created to assess mental ability. According to … Keep Reading → Binet, the sole purpose of the test was to determine what children needed special education. It was never intended to rank students “according to mental worth.” Binet also added that the test could never be considered a reliable indicator of intelligence because all of the components of intelligence could not be tested. In the United States in 1916, Lewis Terman revised Binet’s test and created the Stanford-Binet test. Unlike Binet, Terman believed in fixed intelligence that could be tested. Terman, along with H.H. Goddard pushed for widespread use of the test as a means of definitively determining the intelligence and potential of an individual. The notion of emotional intelligence has tempered concepts of absolute intelligence somewhat, but for many the idea of a fixed intelligence remains.
