The Vexing Legacy of Lewis TermanTerman, Lewis, 1877-1956.Lewis Madison Terman
legendary Stanford psychologist; IQ guru
son: Terman, Fred
Stanford dean and provost and engineering professor
Lewis Madison Terman file at Indiana University
EducationLewis Terman and the measurement of intelligenceCentral Normal College (B.S., B.P., B. A., 1894, 1898)
Indiana University at Bloomington (B.A., M.A., 1903)
Clark University (PH.D. in Psychology, 1905)Career
School principal, San Bernardino, CA (1905)
Professor, Los Angeles Normal School (1907)
Professor, Stanford University (1910-1956)Major Contributions
Ideas and Interests
- Mental Testing
- Refinement of Binet-Simon Tests - The Stanford Achievement Test
- Studies of Gifted Children - Terman's Termites
For his Ph.D. thesis, Terman decided to see what mental tests could do in distinguishing unusually backward students from very bright ones. His study was titled, "Genius and Stupidity: A Study of the Intellectual Processes of Seven "Bright" and Seven "Stupid" Boys." The tests he used emphasized "higher" and complex cognitive functioning, and fell into eight categories:
1. Tests of invention and creative imagination,
2. A typical test of logical processes,
3. Several tests of mathematical ability,
4. Anagrams, blanks in stories, and reading aloud to demonstrate language mastery,
5. Interpretation of fables,
6. Skill in learning the game of chess,
7. Memory tests, and
8. Tests of motor skill.Later, in 1906 while at Stanford, Terman published a revised and perfected Binet-Simon scale for American populations. This "Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale," soon became known as the "Stanford-Binet", and by far the best available individual intelligence test. Then in 1916, Terman adopted William Stern's suggestion that the ratio between mental and chronological age be taken as a unitary measure of intelligence multiplied by 100 to get rid of the decimals. The resulting "intelligence quotient" became known as the "IQ" and is now known in the classic formula: IQ = Mental Age/Chronological Age X 100.
Terman is also well known for his studies with intelligence in children. Terman's Termites as they are known were chosen to test the early ripe-early rot myth. In other words, Terman wanted to know if high IQ children had intellectual success or failure as adults. According to Terman, unusually precocius children were more likely to turn out well than poorly in their later lives. Terman found, among other things, that the gifted were taller, healthier, physically better developed, superior in leadership and social adaptability, dispelling the often held contrary opinion.Terman's points of view regarding gifted youth include:
"Of the founders of modern psychology, my greatest admiration is for Galton. My favorite of all psychologists is Binet, not because of his intelligence test, which was only a by-product of his life-work, but because of his originality of insight, and open-mindedness, and because of the rare charm of personality that shines through all his writings." (Lewis Terman The Intelligence Men)
- They are the top 1 percent in inteligence,
- They should be identified as early as possible in childhood,
- They should be accelerated through school
- They should have a differentiated curriculum and instruction,
- They should have specially trained teachers,
- They should be viewed as a national resource for the betterment of society, and
- They should be allowed to develop in whatever directions their talents and interests dictate.
Publications
- The Measurement of Intelligence (1916)
- The Stanford Achievement Test (1923)
- Genetic Studies of Genius (1925, 1947, 1959)
The work of Lewis Terman (1877-1956), a professor of education and psychology at Stanford University from 1910 to 1946, presented significant impacts on the direction and outcomes of schooling in the United States in the early 1900s and beyond. The tests Terman developed, the research he conducted, and the students he trained all contributed to a multi-tiered educational system strongly prejudiced against immigrant and ethnic minority students.
Terman first gained prominence in 1916 with the publication of The Measurement of Intelligence, where he introduced the Stanford-Binet intelligence test that became widely used in the United States to determine a person's "intellectual ability." With these credentials, Terman was immediately invited during World War I to help the United States military sort out and categorize the multitudes of recruits destined for Europe's murderous trenches. He and one of his graduate students, Author Otis, helped develop the Army Alpha and Beta tests to determine what functions and duties best suited a soldier. In an eighteen month period they tested and classified over 1.7 million inductees. The Beta test differed from the Alpha in that it was developed for illiterate and foreign-language soldiers. By avoiding the use of language and employing only gestures and pantomime, the testers felt that they had a culture-free test. The polemic here, of course, is the general recognition of the near, if not complete, impossibility of extracting culture from content. But, as we will see shortly, this dilemma did not prevent Terman and his acolytes from conquering the minds of educational policy makers.
In addition to his work for the U.S. army, Terman created the Stanford Achievement Test for use in his longitudinal study of gifted children. One significant outcome of this study being the emergence of the famous term "intelligence quotient," or "I.Q." Terman also advocated "a mental test for every child," and in 1919, the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, noting the capacity of intelligence tests to classify large numbers of people, awarded Terman a grant to develop a national intelligence test. Within a year 400,000 tests were available for use in public elementary schools.
Terman's scientific approach to classifying student ability coincided well with prevalent ideas emerging among Progressive educators in the 1910s. In the realm of education, Progressives believed that curriculum and instructional methods should emanate from scientific research. Luckily for Terman, few seriously questioned his unscientific assumptions that intelligence was largely hereditary and that the I.Q. was a valid measurement of intelligence. By 'scientifically' proving that recent immigrants and blacks scored lower than whites due to an inferior mental endowment, he catered strongly to the nativism and prejudice of many Americans.
At Stanford, Terman trained many graduate students who went to their local school districts experiment with Terman's research methods. Two districts, Oakland and San José, faced with increasing enrollment and diversity, solicited their help. In Oakland, the testers concluded that varying inherent mental abilities called for the segregation of students into mentally homogeneous classes. That these divisions occurred along racial and ethnic lines seemed to only confirm the prejudices of the day: Oakland administrators and teachers were enthusiastic over the outcome of the studies. Also, in an ominous reference to the U.S. government's use of Terman's tests to rationalize their perpetration of clear civil rights abuses, such as the Sedition Act of 1917 which led to the jailing union activists and stifling of union organizing, one tester rationalized the need for tracking by observing that "when students were faced with expectations that exceeded their abilities, the natural result was loss of interest, a loss of self-respect or a resort to subterfuge, social unrest, and sham, and the I.W.W. spirit may easily have their beginnings in these early social problems ."
Meanwhile, the 'culture-free' nature of these intelligence tests brought the San José testers to similar conclusions as their Oakland compatriots, with the added finding of 42% mental retardation among "Latins," and a mean I.Q. of 83. Because the tests were culturally neutral, according to the examiners, the "language handicap does not exist in the case of the children of South European descent. . .The true difficulty is one of mental capacity, or general intelligence, which makes Latins unable to compete with the children of North European ancestry in the mastery of the traditional American public school curriculum."
With the practical success of his educational program demonstrated in California's San Francisco Bay Area, Terman moved up the academic ladder to become the President of the American Psychological Association in 1923. From this position he was able to nationally advertise his two major studies: The Intelligence of School Children and Intelligence Tests and School Reorganization. Ability grouping quickly came to characterize many of America's public schools as a "progressive" reform and "thus heralded a new role in society for schools as sorters."
An interesting parallel to the United States' new scientific approach to education was the educational reform occurring in Mexico during the aftermath of the 1910 Revolution. Ironically, this reform began under the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta who has often been labeled as a counterrevolutionary. However, not only did he increase the funding for educational services, but he allowed for his Secretary of Education, Nemesio Garcia Naranjo, to institute a new curriculum that broke with positivist traditions by emphasizing the study of literature, history and philosophy. "By creating a reasonable balance between the arts and the sciences, the secretary struck an important blow at the cientifico philosophy of education."
Sources:
The Encyclopedia of Education, Macmillian (New York, 1971)
Paul Davis Chapman, "Schools as Sorters: Testing and Tracking in California 1910-1925," a paper delivered to the San Francisco Commission on Education (April 8, 1979)
Michael C. Meyer, The Course of Mexican History, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press (New York, 1983)
Prepared by Philip Leeman (UCLA)
Termites:
Jess Oppenheimer (1913-1988)
Edward Dmytryk (1908-1999):
Uses of Intelligence Tests -- Lewis M. Terman
Lewis Terman Study at Stanford University
also mirror site at William James Sidis
