Intelligence Testing

The first intelligence test was developed by Alfred Binet, from France, in the early 1900s. Binet was charged with developing a tool by which one could differentiate levels of intelligence between different groups of students. The goal was to be able to identify children who were intellectually inferior and intellectually superior so that they could be placed in schools that [Page 1193]catered to students with similar intelligence levels. The Binet scale was created, and a standard was developed based on the data from these test scores, and as a result of this standard, the term intelligence quotient, or IQ, emerged and entered the education system.

H. H. Goddard believed that Binet's intelligence test should be used to screen students for his school, the Vineyard Training School in New Jersey. He decided that Binet's IQ test was a tool that he could use to label and classify students as normal, idiots, imbeciles, and morons. Goddard believed that intelligence was not only inborn, but also fixed and could be measured. Lewis M. Terman believed that intelligence was fixed and hereditary.

In 1916, the Stanford-Binet test was revised as a result of Terman's beliefs, and the test became the standard intelligence test used in the United States. As a result of Goddard's and Terman's work, American educators believed that this was a universal tool that they could use to measure intelligence and identify students who required special instructional services in their schools. Intelligence testing continues in American schools.

In 1917, the U.S. military gave psychologist Robert Yerkes permission to administer the intelligence test to over 1.75 million army recruits. The Army Alpha test was developed as a group-administered written test for recruits who were deemed literate, and it was meant to measure a variety of parameters, such as verbal and numerical abilities and the ability to follow directions. Another test, the Army Beta test, was a pictorial test for men who were deemed illiterate and had no formal schooling, and who failed the Army Alpha test. Questions on the test were developed to measure aptitude and required recruits to identify what was missing from a picture and to complete number sequences.

Yerkes believed that these tests measured one's native intellectual ability, and that innate intelligence was not affected by one's culture or educational opportunities. On the other hand, Carl Brigham, one of Yerkes's colleagues, believed that people from certain ethnic groups were intellectually superior to others. As a result, people started to believe that genetic differences between races existed and that the intelligence tests could help identify these innate racial differences among various ethnic groups.

Terman, Goddard, and Yerkes advocated eugenics. Eugenicists believed that people from minority groups were contributing to a national degeneration and they pushed to keep unfit people or degenerates from reproducing, marrying, and entering the United States. The goal for eugenicists was to create a better human race, and the founding fathers of eugenics viewed intelligence testing as a way to achieve this goal. Later, Brigham would develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, which is commonly used as a requirement for entrance into higher education, and Yerkes served as the president of the American Psychological Association.

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