The Development of IQ Testing
During the beginning of the 20th century American education had a host of issues ranging from the desperate difference in education between racially segregated schools too an influx of school aged children flooding American education systems during the industrial times of the early 1900’s1. This created a wide variety of problems in the school setting. Therefore, the fields the education and psychology merged to create a “classifying and sorting” model that attempted to place children in classrooms with other children that had similar abilities 1. In order to categorize children into ability groupings a scale had to be made that could rate the cognitive abilities of a child. In 1905, the psychologist Alfred Binet and psychiatrist Theodore Simon published the “measuring scale of intelligence”; creating the first published Intelligence Test for children and forever changing American education 2. The development of the first intelligence test also transformed “special education” as we know it 1.
Therefore, with school systems being populated with diverse students and the emergence of intelligence testing, schools had to find a professional that was trained in administering and scoring assessments that could act as “the gatekeeper to special education”; thus creating the field of “school psychology”1. Traditionally, school psychologists took on the role of a “diagnostician,” where they conducted intelligence assessments on children then diagnosed them as “qualified for special education, or not qualified” 1. Consequently, the intelligence testing movement would be criticized in later years. The development and emergence of intelligence testing allowed American education to become committed to the goal of sorting children into specific categories, thus providing a “pathways for continued segregation” 3. The early intelligence tests were normed and tested in predominantly white communities; therefore, during the “classifying and sorting” movement minority students of non-white decent became over-represented in the special education system. Since the emergence of intelligence testing there have been many court cases (Brown vs. Board of Education, Hobson vs. Hansen, ect.) that have shaped and molded intelligence testing into what it is today 4. Today national organizations such as the American Psychology Association (APA) and the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) enforce guidelines and laws that prevent the use of biased intelligence assessments in schools, and prevent schools from solely using intelligence tests to diagnose or qualify students for special education services 4.
The emergence of intelligence testing also played a role in WW 1, where Robert Yerkes and a committee of six representatives developed first adult intelligence tests; the Army Alpha Test and the Army Beta Test to help the United States Military screen incoming soldiers for “intellectual deficiencies, psychopathic tendencies, nervous intangibility, and inadequate self-control” in 1917 5. The Alpha Army and the Beta Army tests are considered to be the first adult intelligence measures ever to be published.
The First Child-Based Intelligence Test
The psychologist Alfred Binet and psychiatrist Theodore Simon developed the first children’s intelligence test in 1905 2. The intelligence test “measuring scale of intelligence” consisted of a series of 30 brief cognitive tests, measuring language skills (following commands, semantic judgment, and naming), memory, reasoning, digit span, and psychophysical judgments 2.The assessment could be administered in approximately 40 min 2. Therefore, school personal administered the intelligence tests to screen children for the cognitive abilities 1. The administration of the”measuring scale of intelligence” either qualified children for special education or did not qualify children for special education 2. However, the early intelligence tests were normed and tested in predominantly white communities; therefore, during the “classifying and sorting” movement minority students of non-white decent became over-represented in the special education system 3. Nevertheless, researcher have adapted intelligence assessments over time to be more culturally sensative, but there are still issue regarding intelligence testing biases looming over education today 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet[/caption]
The First Adult-Base Intelligence Test
Intelligence testing plays a very important role in how school psychologist and special educators evaluate and assess children for placement in special education programs. Many Educational systems in the modern society use the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children to assess the intellectual functioning of children. However, just because intelligence testing is a huge phenomena in the education world, the creation of adult intelligence testing was not intended for educational use. Rather, the first adult intelligence tests where created during World War I to screen the thousands of soldiers being recruited by the United States Military 6.
Robert Yerkes and a committee of six representatives developed two intelligence tests; the Army Alpha Test and the Army Beta Test to help the United States Military screen incoming soldiers for “intellectual deficiencies, psychopathic tendencies, nervous intangibility, and inadequate self-control”. The Alpha test was a verbal test for literate recruits and was divided into eight test categories, which included included (following oral directions, arithmetical problems, practical judgments, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences, number series completion, analogies and information)5.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/images/eugenics/detail/2301-2350/2323d.jpg%5B/caption%5D
Whereas, the Beta test was a nonverbal test used for testing illiterate or non-English speaking recruits. The Beta test did not require those being tested to use written language, but rather the examinee’s completed tasks by using visual aids 5 The Beta Intelligence test was divided into seven subtests, which included: “Test 1- assessed the ability of army recruits to trace the path of a maze; Test 2- assessed the ability of cube analysis; Test 3-assessed the ability of pattern analysis using an X-O series; Test 4- assessed the ability of coding digits with symbols; Test 5- assessed the ability of number checking; Test 6-assessed the ability of pictorial completion; and Test 7- assessed the ability of geometrical construction” 7.
http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/race_intel.html%5B/caption%5D
Overall, the Army Alpha Tests and the Army Beta Tests were designed to find the mental age of military recruits and to assess incoming recruits for success in the US Military by testing ones ability to: (understand language, to perform reasoning with semantic and quantitative relationships, to make practical judgments, to infer rules and regulations, and to recall general information). The Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests were heavily criticized for being bias, and for not pedicuring that actual success of incoming soldiers. Nevertheless, Robert Yerkes’s innovations in the standardized testing and the use of psychometrics to calculate test those standardized tests are still seen in intelligence testing today8.
Sources
1. [Merrell, Ervin, & Gimpel. School Psychologist for the 21st Century. New York: Press,2006. Print.]↩
2. [Boake, Corwin. “From the Binet–Simon to the Wechsler–Bellevue: Tracing the history of intelligence testing.” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 24.3 (2002): 383-405.]↩
3. [Harry, B., and Klingner, J. Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? Understanding Race and Disability in Schools. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2006.]↩
4. [Jacob, Susan, Dawn Decker, and Timothy Hartshorne. Ethics and Law for School Psychologists. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011.]↩
5. [John Carson. (1993). Army alpha, army brass, and search for intelligence.
84(2), 278-309.]↩
6. [(2002). Pioneers in standardized testing. Issues in Science and Technology,
19(9), p. 1-5.]↩
7. [Gould, S. J. “A nation of morons”. Mark Holah. Retrieved March 10, 2014.]↩]
8. [Ernest R Hilgard. (1965). Robert M. Yerkes “Biography”. National Academy of Sciences.
P. 1-43.]↩]
Intelligence Testing in Education 
