Intelligence Tests

Not far from the year 1900 the school authorities of the city of Paris, desiring to know whether the backwardness of many children in school resulted from inattention, mischievousness and similar difficulties of a moral nature, or from genuine inability to learn, put the problem into the hands of Alfred Binet, a leading psychologist of the day; and within a few years thereafter he and a collaborator brought out the now famous Binet-Simon tests for intelligence. In devising these tests, Binet's plan was to leave school knowledge to one side, and look for information and skill picked up by the child from his elders and playmates in the ordinary experience of life. Further, Binet wisely decided not to seek for any single test for so broad a matter as intelligence, but rather to employ many brief tests and give the child plenty of chances to demonstrate what he had learned and what he could do. These little tests were graded in difficulty from the level of the three-year-old to that of the twelve-year-old, and the general plan was to determine how far up the scale the child could successfully pass the tests.

These were not the first tests in existence by any means, but they were the first attempt at a measure of general intelligence, and they proved extraordinarily useful. They have been added to and revised by other psychologists, notably by Terman in America, who has extended the scale of tests up to the adult level. A few samples from Terman's revision will give an idea of the character of the Binet tests.

From the tests for three-year-olds: Naming familiar objects--the child must name correctly at least three of five common objects that are shown him. Six-year test: Finding omissions in pictures of faces, from which the nose, or one eye, etc., is left out. Four such pictures are shown, and three correct responses are required to pass the test. Eight-year test: Tell how wood and coal are alike; and so with three other pairs of familiar things; two out of four correct responses are required to pass the test. {273} Twelve-year test: Vocabulary test--rough definitions showing the child's understanding of forty words out of a standard list of one hundred.

The question may be raised, "Why such arbitrary standards-three out of five required here, two out of four there, forty out of a hundred the next time?" The answer is that the tests have been standardized by actual trial on large numbers of children, and so standardized that the average child of a given age can just barely pass the tests of that age.

Intelligence is measured by Binet on a scale of mental age. The average child of, let us say, eight years and six months is said to have a mental age of eight years and six months; and any individual who does just as well as this is said to have this mental age, no matter what his chronological age may be. The average child of this age passes all the tests for eight years and below, and three of the six tests for age nine; or passes an equivalent number of tests from the total series. Usually there is some "scatter" in the child's successes, as he fails in a test here and there below his mental age, and succeeds here and there above his mental age, but the failures below and the successes above balance each other in the average child, so that he comes out with a mental age equal to his chronological age.

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If a child's mental age is the same as his chronological age, he is just average, neither bright nor dull. If his mental age is much above his chronological, he is bright; if much below, dull. His degree of brightness or dullness can be measured by the number of years his mental age is above or below his chronological age. He is, mentally, so many years advanced or retarded.

Brightness or dullness can also be measured by the intelligence quotient, which is employed so frequently that it is customarily abbreviated to "IQ". This is the mental age divided by the chronological, and is usually expressed in per cent. The IQ of the exactly average child, of any age, is 1, or 100 per cent. The IQ of the bright child is above 100 and of the dull child below 100. About sixty per cent. of all children have an IQ between 90 and 110, twenty per cent, are below 90 and twenty per cent, above 110. The following table gives the distribution in somewhat greater detail:

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For convenience, those with IQ under 70 are sometimes labeled "feeble-minded", and the others, in order, "borderline", "low normal", "average" (from 90 to 110), "superior", "very superior", "exceedingly superior"; but this is arbitrary and really unscientific, for what the facts show is not a separation into classes, but a continuous gradation from one extreme to the other. The lower extreme is near zero, and the upper extreme thus far found is about 180.

While the mental age tells an individual's intellectual level at a given time, the IQ tells how fast he has progressed. An IQ of 125 means that he has picked up knowledge and skill 25 per cent. faster than the average individual--that he has progressed as far in four years as the average child does in five, or as far in eight as the average does in ten, or as far in twelve as the average does in fifteen. The IQ usually remains fairly constant as the child grows older, and thus represents his rate of mental growth. It furnishes a pretty good measure of the individual's intelligence.