Alfred Binet and Lewis Terman and...

Do you know what your IQ is? (find out here: www.free-iqtest.net/) This is just a fun, little test to see where you fall. After reading this blog, you'll be able to tell if your intelligence is average, below average, or above average. To prepare for this blog, I took several IQ tests to see how accurate they were (at least to each other). Each time, I got an IQ of 118. If you don't really understand that, keep reading!

Let me start by telling you about Alfred Binet. Back at the beginning of the 20th century in France, a law was passed that said all children must attend an academic establishment. The French schools and the government were concerned when some students couldn't seem to follow along with a curriculum. Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon were asked to figure out and try to help solve the problem. 

They started by assuming that all children have the same mental abilities and development, some are just faster than others. Binet and Simon were focused on measuring a child's mental age. Let's say that they measured my mental age. I'm 18 (almost 19). I would hope that they would say that I have a mental age of 18 (my brother may disagree). Others who have below-average mental ages (a 15 year old that may perform at the level of a 5 year old) would have more difficulty on schoolwork. 

Binet and Simon were certain in stating that they weren't assuming WHY children were sometimes functioning at lower than average levels. Binet did not want his test to be used to label and limit children that may show below average scores.

Binet died in 1911, and it was about this time when Louis Terman was a professor at Stanford University. He researched into the questions that Binet asked French schoolchildren and realized that they (for some reason) did not work with Californian schoolchildren. So he changed it up and created the Stanford-Binet Test. It really was Binet's original test, with adaptations by Terman. 

From the Stanford-Binet comes IQ numbers. William Stern created the intelligence quotient (IQ) after researching the Stanford-Binet. IQ does not go against the Stanford-Binet; instead, it goes along with it. 

IQ = mental age / chronological age x 100

Whatever number you come up with is your IQ. 

(Have a little fun and try to find out your mental age first: http://yourmentalage.com). Then, come back to this equation and plug in your answer to see if your IQ matches to the first quiz at the beginning of the blog. Mine was pretty close...doing it this way led me to have an IQ of 122, instead of 118. 

A modern test that is out was created by David Wechsler, called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). This is a more modern version for adults, but there is a version for children, too. It is like the Stanford-Binet in that it gives a score for overall intelligence, but also subscores for different categories. Having subcategories is a big difference in the Stanford-Binet and the WAIS. If you were to take a version of the WAIS, here is a bell curve of where you would land. 

I hope this blog educated you on intelligence, in general! Thanks for taking part! Next time, we'll be taking a break from some theories and discussing defense mechanisms!