Measuring the intelligence is something very essential in any educational system, be it in public or in private educational institution. It was only around 1910, few years after the invention of the first usable intelligence test have scientific workers started to fully appreciate the importance of intelligence tests as a an essential guide to educational procedure. In fact up to the present such tests are still very popular and useful. The first usable intelligence test was invented and published by a French psychologist and inventor, Alfred Binet.
Binet’s invention, called the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale, became the basis of today’s popular (Intelligence Quotient) IQ tests. It was published in 1905 and other two revised publications in 1908 and 1911. The test was named Binet-Simon after the inventor Binet and his collaborator in the said invention, Theodore Simon. The Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale was invented with an objective to assist in identifying school children who have needs in coping with school curriculum.
The test has become a means of perfection and a measure in evaluating educational systems and practices and in particular a tool “for diagnosing individual possibilities and needs” (Terman viii) Aside from Binet, the names that have a loud sound in terms of the measures of human intelligence or cognitive process are Robert J. Sternberg for his Triarchic Theory, Dr. John C. Raven with his Progressive Matrices, Allan and Nadeen Kaufman and their Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) and David Wechsler for the Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) .
These individuals have made tremendous contributions to psychology especially when it is related to psychometry and cognitive process. II. The Works of Binet and the Development of Binet-Simon Scale Being the pioneer in the field of intelligence measuring scale, the work of Binet can never be disregarded when the testing of intelligence is being talked about. In fact, even up to this time the concept of Binet about intelligence “is essentially the one that is held at the present time by psychologists.
” (Pintner 24) Even before the publication of the Binet-Simon Scale or “the scale”, Binet had already numerous works relating to the study of intelligence. These include his collaborations with Henri in 1896 “in an article discussing the field of individual psychology” (Pintner 26), the Measurement in Individual Psychology in 1898, the Attention et Adaptation published right before the scale, his book “L’etude experimentale de l’intelligence in 1903 and his works on Handwriting and Feeblemindedness as determinants of and correlated to intelligence, in 1904 and 1905, respectively.
In his article New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Abnormal Children, the idea of intelligence scale appeared the first time and it was exactly termed as une echelle metrique d’itelligence. It is “here too we find the first specifications of intelligence tests, namely, they must be simple, must not consume a long time, they must be heterogeneous and not pedagogical”. (Pintner 31) This set of tests is also known as the 1905 scale containing the idea of graded series, the concept of intelligence and the conception of the fundamental qualities of an intelligence test.
It was composed of thirty items in increasing difficulty although there was grouping yet according to age. It was in 1908 that Binet published one of his more important works, the 1908 Scale that appeared in his article entitled The Development of Intelligence in Children. It is important to note that during this time, the tests, unlike the previous 1905 Scale, has been grouped according to appropriate ages. Another innovation of this scale as compared to the previous one is the introduction of mental age.
This concept is actually “one of Binet’s important and valuable contributions to the problem of mental testing” (Pintner 32) stating that the mental ability of a person is expressed by the age that he/she achieved in the series of graded tests. III. Scaled Intelligence: Binet-Simon Scale to Stanford-Binet Scale After the success of Binet’s work, the 1908 Scale, continuous developments and innovations are done with regards to or related to his measure of intelligence through tests.
He, however warned the public that the scores in the test “should not be taken too literally because of the “partial plasticity of intelligence” (Fancher 151) and environmental factors together with the inherent margin of error in the test . A more accepted innovation of the Binet-Simon Scale, and eventually became very popular, came out in 1916 engineered by a Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman. His work was entitled Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale or commonly known as the Stanford-Binet.
Stanford-Binet is an overhauled Binet-Simon Scale wherein new items were added to the tests and some original ones of the latter were removed. It, naturally, was done with proper study and scientific approach in validating the experiments done to make this work a success. Moreover, heavy improvements was made to the old scale as American psychologist Robert Yerkes called on the expert testers including Terman and Goddard.
The Scale, which was originally made for the mentally challenged, according to Yerkes, “should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives but rather for the selection of men in order that they may be properly placed in the military service. ” (Fancher 117) The test style approach to measuring intelligence, as Binet has admitted, have its shortcomings. In fact test administrators who have handled and proctored some group tests of intelligence noted the wide difference in the approach the testees have on their respective tests.
With non-timed tests such as attitude or personality batteries, the first person to complete the task may do so in less than half the time that the last person dutifully hands in their booklet. Equally, with timed tests, some testees appear to approach the task with intense earnestness, as if their lives, or at least their careers, depended on it, whereas others appear cavalier, even nonchalant. (Furnham 289) Another possible error that can be attributed when test style of measurement is imposed upon testees, as Furnham have elaborated, is the “problem of dissimulation” or the subjects that do not give honest answers.
One of the latest publications on measures of intelligence measure, representing “the latest in a series of innovations in the assessment of intelligence and abilities using qualitative and quantitative methods” (Becker 1) is the 2003 publication of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition. The following matrices are taken from the bulletin, History of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales: Content and Psychometrics by Kirk A. Becker published in 2003 by Riverside Publishing in Itasca, Illinois. These matrices illustrates in a summarized form what the latest Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales can be.