Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [146]
Still interested in the measurement of intelligence, he went back to the method he had used to study his daughters’ thinking. Conceiving of intelligence not as Galton had, in terms of sensory and motor abilities, but as a combination of cognitive abilities, Binet and a co-worker at the laboratory, Victor Henri, began trying out on Parisian schoolchildren a number of tests of those abilities—memory tests (for words, musical notes, colors, and digits), word-association tests, sentence-completion tests, and so on. Their findings suggested that a battery of such tests might measure intelligence if one knew how to weigh the data.
A propitious turn of events spurred Binet to develop this promising lead. Mandatory universal education of children had been instituted in France in 1881, and in 1899 the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child, a professional group of which Binet was a member, began urging the Ministry of Public Instruction to do something about retarded children who had to go to school but were unable to cope with standard classroom work. In 1904, the ministry appointed a commission, of which Binet was a member, to study the problem. The commission unanimously recommended that children who had been identified by an examination as retarded should be placed in special classes or schools where they could get education suitable to their condition, but it said nothing about what the examination should consist of.
Binet and his former colleague in craniometry, Théodore Simon, took it on themselves to create such an examination. First they assembled a number of tests, some drawn from studies made earlier at the Salpêtrière, others from the work of Binet and Henri at the Sorbonne laboratory, and still others that they formulated. They then visited some primary schools and tried their tests on children ranging from three to twelve who were considered normal by their teachers, and on others who were considered subnormal. They also tested a number of children institutionalized at the Salpêtrière who were classified as idiots, imbeciles, and débiles. *
After laboriously administering the examination to hundreds of children and omitting or modifying those tests which proved unfeasible, Binet and Simon fashioned what they called a “measuring scale of intelligence.” They described it in L’Année Psychologique in 1905 as “a series of tests of increasing difficulty, starting from the lowest intellectual level that can be observed, and ending with that of normal intelligence. Each group [of tests] in the series corresponds to a different mental level.”26
It was not yet an intelligence test, since it provided no method of scoring the results; it was only a first effort to suggest how one could be constructed. The first of the thirty tests in the battery was extremely simple. The experimenter moved a lighted match back and forth before the eyes of the subject to see whether there existed the coordination of head and eyes associated with vision. The later tests were increasingly difficult, involving such tasks as the ability to judge which of two lines was longer, to repeat three numbers, to repeat a sentence fifteen words long, to draw from memory a design that had been displayed, to say how a folded and refolded paper, out of which a small piece was cut, would look when unfolded, and finally and most difficult, to define abstract terms (“What difference is there between esteem and affection? What difference is there between weariness and sadness?”).27 At each age, normal children could answer questions and accomplish tasks satisfactorily up to a point; the older they were, the farther they could go through the series. The scale was indeed a measuring device of sorts.
While Binet and Simon were testing some children who were identified as normal and others considered retarded, they had a brilliant insight: the retarded children’s intelligence was not of a different kind from that of the normal children; it was simply not as developed as it should have been by their