Alfred Binet and Early Intelligence Testing

The early study of intelligence involved many factors that researchers considered, including health, social conditions and heredity. The heritability of IQ is still a complex field, and no single simple mechanism can describe how cognitive abilities develop.

Although we give credit to William Stern for an important later step in the IQ concept, we should say some words about his inspiration – the work and research of Alfred Binet. You can read in some articles that he is the inventor of the IQ test. More precisely, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed one of the first practical intelligence tests, oriented mainly toward children, while later researchers changed the way intelligence-test results were summarized.

During the early 1900s, the French government asked psychologist Alfred Binet (July 11, 1857 – October 18, 1911) and his colleague Theodore Simon (1872–1961) to help decide which students were most likely to experience difficulty in schools. The government had passed laws requiring that French children attend school, so it was important to find a way to identify children who would need specialized assistance.

His aim was to test each of the children and value their memory skills, attention skills and problem-solving skills. He quickly realized that some children were able to answer more advanced questions that older children were generally able to answer, while other children of the same age were only able to answer questions that younger children could typically answer. Based on this observation, Binet suggested the concept of a mental age, or a measure of performance based on the average abilities of children of a certain age group.

Historical note: Binet's work was intended to identify educational needs, not to create a fixed label for a person's worth or potential. Modern intelligence testing and scoring have changed substantially since the early Binet–Simon scales.

Continue with the Binet–Simon scale or William Stern and the IQ concept.