Developing individual in society Lecture 5: 01/03/2021 Intelligence Lecturer: Ava Horowitz History of IQ testing Alfred Binet - Alfred Binet, tasked to help identify children requiring special education. - Created a solution with Simon. - Lots of very different but short tasks, with individual testing by trained examiners. Mental age - The highest test the child could pass would determine their mental age. - E.g., Child passes a 6 year old test, but not a 7 year old test. Assigned the mental age of 6, despite possibly being older. - Children with mental age significantly under real age = Require special education. Stern (1912) suggested to calculate IQ. IQ = (Mental age / Chronological age) * 100 Binet worried what would be done with these tests: - Thought intelligence is too complex to capture in a single number. - Reified as if IQ were a real entity, as it could be measured objectively. - Feared that people would assume IQ cannot be changed. - Feared many would assume intelligence is inborn. - Feared that being old your IQ would result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. - Worried it would be used to rank ALL children, and not just to identify those who require help. H. H. Goddard. - A Hereditarian. Someone who believed intelligence is innate and unchangeable. - No amount of special education would ever help change intelligence. - A part of the eugenics movement. - This movement argued for the improvement of the US genetic 'stock' through euthanasia, sterilisation, immigration restrictions and outlawing miscegenation. Goddard contributed: - The term 'moron'. - A 'moron' was under the normal range of IQ. - They would sit above 'idiots and imbeciles', but still below the average. - Argued for the confining and sterilisation of morons.
- Tested 152 immigrants on Ellis Island as they entered the country. Tested Italians, Hungarians, Jews and Russians. - Presented these tests in English, and these immigrants did not perform well. - Goddard declared the majority of these people morons. Robert Yerkes - Created an army test to test WW1 recruits. - Two versions, Army Alpha and Army Beta. - Individual tests if neither could be done. - The army did not use much of these results, but the data consisted of 1.75 million males. Popularised results of this testing: - Declared the average US mental age of 13 years. Termed a "logical absurdity" by Gould, 1981. - Graded European immigrants by mental age. - Placed 'the Negro' at the bottom. Problems with these tests: - Alpha & Beta tests not equivalent. Most immigrants took the Beta tests. - Beta did not require literacy but did require being able to hold a pencil. - Some taking the test had never held a pencil in their life. - Beta did require you to recognise and understand numbers. - Vast differences in instructions between beta and alpha tests. - Can also be affected by other factors, such as culture, language, schooling, attention, anxiety, etc. Cyril Burt - Created an