History of Intelligence Testing

Alfred Binet was commissoned to identyfy students who needed educational assistance, thats when the first IQ test was born.

In the 1900's the French Government asked psychologist Alfred Binet to decide which students were more likely to experience difficulty in schools. The Governmemt passed laws requiring that all French children attend school, so it was important to find a way to identify children who would need special assitance.

Binet and a colleague name Theodore Simon began developing a number of questions on things that had not been taught in schools; such as attention, memory, and problem solving skills. Binet used these questions to determine which ones served as the predictors of school success. This is when he discovered that some children were able to answer some question, where as others wasn't.

Alfred Binet Intelligence Test is still used to this day. Binet stressed the limitation of suggesting that intellegence is an influenced by a number of factors and this changes over time, and can only be compared amongs children with similar backgrounds (Siegler, 1992).