IntellIgence Tests

History

In 1905, Alfred Binet and his medical student, Theodore Simon, developed a diagnostic method for distinguishing abnormal from normal boys in his Sorbonne laboratory and the Perray-Vaucluse asylum. During the late 1910s, Henry Goddard translated the Binet-Simon Scale and administered it to his young Vineland Training School charges and about 2,000 children in local New Jersey schools. Goddard wanted all children to be examined, individual by individual, claiming that 2% of school students were feebleminded or mentally defective. Like Binet, he defined low-grade intelligence as arrested mental development with classifications of idiot, imbecile, and moron and recommended segregation into ungraded, special classes and surgical sterilization for these students. Over 25,000 copies of Goddard's translation were distributed across the United States by the time Lewis Terman's Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale was published in 1916. By 1920, the Bineting of individuals had slowed considerably as the Army Alpha Scale was transformed into the National Intelligence Test; the new group tests enabled a single psychologist to examine large masses of students simultaneously. Although Binet found intelligence to be variable, ranging in levels of comprehension, judgment, reasoning, and invention, this finding was contentious—for other psychologists intelligence meant mental adaptability to new problems and was fixed as a trait. Intelligence tests were the most utilized instrument in psychology through the 1920s; about 300 cities in the United States and Canada were using intelligence tests for ability grouping by 1930. Albeit with resistance, during the 1910s and 1920s, school access was granted to university researchers to measure students' literacies, physicians to inspect students' bodies, and psychologists to examine students' minds.

Criticisms

Criticisms came from physicians and psychiatrists claiming that psychologists transgressed their jurisdiction into therapeutics. Populist groups countered that intelligence examinations were implicated in the medicalization of schools. University students sarcastically dismissed claims that intelligence tests provided views into the [Page 488]inner workings of their heads. In the early 1920s, academics such as John Dewey critiqued the tests as inegalitarian, while journalists such as Grace Adams skewered the testers as pseudo-scientists. In the mid 1920s, fueled by notable reports, including Terman's Measurement of Intelligence (1916) and Carl Brigham's Study of American Intelligence (1923), African American intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, exposed premises of eugenics and challenged the validity of IQ tests by identifying cultural biases, factoring economic conditions and educational opportunity into findings. By the end of the decade, students grew tired from the response burden, and administrators grew wary. In 1932, the National Education Association (NEA) announced that the tests were dethroned and in 1933 the U.S. Senate moved to regulate testing as a basis for classifying, grading, or segregating school students. The desegregation decision for Brown v. Board of Education (1954) relied on a social science statement reiterating the variabilities and contingencies of intelligence test results. However, intelligence testing only temporarily slowed or was superseded by achievement tests and the courts were reluctant to intervene in ability grouping practices, despite calls for moratoria by the Association of Black Psychologists and NEA in the 1960s and intense legal challenges in the 1970s and 1980s.

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