Widely used intelligence test.

The oldest and most influential intelligence test, devised in 1916 by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman (1877-1956), using the 1908 Binet-Simon model. Although some of its concepts, such as mental age and intelligence quotient, are questioned by many today, the test is still widely used to assess cognitive development, and often to determine placement in special education classes. Most recently revised in 1986, it can be used with children ages 2 to adult. Consisting of questions and short tasks arranged from easy to difficult, the Stanford-Binet measures a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal skills. Its 15 tests are divided into the following four cognitive areas: 1) verbal reasoning (vocabulary, comprehension, absurdities, verbal relations); 2) quantitative reasoning (math, number series, equation building); 3) abstract/visual reasoning (pattern analysis, matrices, paper folding and cutting, copying); and 4) short-term memory (memory for sentences, digits, and objects, and bead memory). While the child's attitude and behavior during the test are noted, they are not used to determine the result, which is arrived at by converting a single raw score for the entire test to a figure indicating "mental age" (the average age of a child achieving that score). A formula is then used to arrive at the intelligence quotient, or IQ. An IQ of 100 means that the child's chronological and mental ages match. Traditionally, IQ scores of 90-109 are considered average, scores below 70 indicate mental retardation, and scores of 140 or above place a child into the "gifted" category.

For Further Study

Books

McCullough, Virginia. Testing and Your Child: What You Should Know About 150 of the Most Common Medical, Educational, and Psychological Tests. New York: Plume, 1992.

Shore, Milton F., Patrick J. Brice, and Barbara G. Love. When Your Child Needs Testing: What Parents, Teachers, and Other Helpers Need to Know about Psychological Testing. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

Walsh, W. Bruce, and Nancy E. Betz. Tests and Assessment. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.