Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 77

On this basis, Binet and Simon produced their fi rst “Metrical Scale of
Intelligence” in 1905. It contained thirty items, designed for children aged
three to twelve years, arranged in order of diffi culty. Th e items were
grouped according to per for mance at diff er ent ages and teacher’s judg-
ments, as just mentioned. Here are examples of some of the items:

Imitating gestures and following simple commands

Naming objects in pictures

Repeating spoken digits

Defi ning common words

Drawing designs from memory

Telling how objects are alike (“similarities”)

Comparing two lines of unequal length

Putting three nouns or three verbs into a sentence

Th ey also included some “abstract” (comprehension) questions, for ex-
ample: (a) “When a person has off ended you, and comes to off er his apol-
ogies, what should you do?” or (b) Defi ning abstract words (by de-
scribing the diff erence between such words as “boredom” and “weariness,”
“esteem” and “friendship”).
Th e tester progressed through the items with each child until the lat-
ter could do no more. Per for mance was then compared with the average
for the age group to which the child belonged. If a child could pass half
the tests expected of a six year old, say, then the child was said to have
a mental age of six. Binet used the diff erence between the mental age and
the chronological age as an index of retardation. He considered two years
to be a serious defi ciency.
Th is was how the fi rst modern intelligence test was created. Within a
few years, translations were appearing in many parts of the world. In 1912,
William Stern proposed the use of the ratio of mental age to chronologi-
cal age to yield the now familiar intelligence quotient or IQ:

IQ=

mentalage

biologicalage

× 100

And so was born the IQ test.

This content downloaded from 139.184.14.159 on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 13:52:12 UTC