Terman, Lewis M.

Education and Early Career

Lewis M. Terman was born January 15, 1877, on an Indiana farm, the 12th of 14 children. At age 15, he entered Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, to prepare for a career in teaching. After graduation, he taught briefly, during which time he met and married a fellow teacher, Anna Minton. In 1898, he became the principal of a high school, a position that he retained until 1901. He then enrolled at Indiana [Page 1084]University, where he earned an additional bachelor's degree and a master's degree. It was here that he first entertained the idea of becoming a psychologist, encouraged in part by the birth of his first child (Terman, 1961).

In 1903, Terman matriculated at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, one of the premier universities for psychology at the time. The president of Clark University, G. Stanley Hall, was a pioneer American psychologist who had a profound effect on Terman's future career. One of Hall's primary interests was in promoting a scientific view toward understanding development. An important part of his work was to establish norms for children and adolescents. For more than 30 years, Hall conducted Monday night seminars in his home, at which students reported their research. Terman wrote that he found those Monday night sessions so stimulating that he would have to take a hot bath afterward to calm his nerves (Terman, 1961).

Terman used “bright” and “dull” groups as participants in his doctoral dissertation, trying to identify tests that would bring out differences in their performance. After graduation from Clark, he moved to California, largely for his health—he had earlier been diagnosed with a mildly active case of tuberculosis. Initially, he worked as a high school principal. In 1906, he accepted a position at Los Angeles Normal School, and in 1910, he moved to Stanford University, where he remained for the rest of his career. It was at Stanford that his career blossomed. He later served as chair of the department of psychology for several decades, and helped to transform it into a first-class department.

The Stanford-Binet Scale of Intelligence

Terman's first important work was his attempt to revise the 1908 Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale to make it more suitable for an American audience. Alfred Binet, a Frenchman, had devised the first successful modern intelligence test, publishing the earliest scale in 1905, with two revisions before his death in 1911. Although Binet had used the concept of mental age in his work, it was the German psychologist William Stern who proposed calculating a ratio between mental age and chronological age as an indication of the child's level of functioning. Terman multiplied the ratio by 100 to eliminate the decimal point and the modern notion of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, was born.

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