(The Measurement of Intelligence - An Explanation of and a...)
The Measurement of Intelligence - An Explanation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the - Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon - Intelligence Scale is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Lewis Madison Terman is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Lewis Madison Terman then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
Sex And Personality Studies In Masculinity And Femininity
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
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Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist.
Background
Terman was born on a farm in Johnson County, Indiana, in 1877. He was the son of James Terman and Martha Cutsinger. Terman stayed at home until he was fifteen, working on the farm in season. His father had a good collection of books, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Terman became a voracious reader, fiercely ambitious for more education.
Education
Between periods of teaching in a rural school, he attended Central Normal School at Danville, Indiana, from which he received the Bachelor of Arts in 1898.
Terman was still eager for further education, however, and resolved to become a psychologist. After two years at Indiana University, Terman went to Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which he received the Ph. D. in 1905.
Career
When Terman was still only twenty-one, he became the principal of a nearby township high school.
It was at Clark University that he became interested in mental testing, seeing the possibilities it provided for the study of intellectually gifted children, a subject that had fascinated him from his early adolescence. For his dissertation, he constructed a massive battery of tests that he gave to seven bright and seven dull children. The results convinced him that well-designed tests could differentiate between children with great intellectual promise and those who lacked it.
Terman's health had never been robust, and his family medical history placed him at severe risk from tuberculosis. In 1905, when he was twenty-eight, it became clear that he had contracted the disease. On urgent medical advice, he accepted a high school principalship in the benign climate of San Bernardino, California; the following year he moved to a faculty position at Los Angeles State Normal School, where he remained until 1910. There he found stimulating colleagues (including the young Arnold Gesell) who supported him in his decision to construct an American version of Alfred Binet's French-language intelligence test.
In 1910 he accepted an appointment in the Department of Education at Stanford University and at once began the arduous work of constructing new test items to add to Binet's. Then came the equally demanding process of standardizing his new test. The result was the famous Stanford-Binet test, the standard intelligence test in English-speaking countries for the next thirty years, which Terman described in The Measurement of Intelligence, published in 1916. The immediate success and wide usefulness of the test brought Terman national fame among psychologists as well as educators. When intelligence tests were needed by the army in World War I, Terman was called to Washington, commissioned a major, and employed in the construction of the Army Alpha and Beta tests.
Returning to Stanford in 1919, he began his famous study of gifted children. He selected about 1, 500 ten-year-old California youngsters who had intelligence quotients of 140 or over, measured on a scale of Terman's own design on which an average child has an IQ of 100. With a corps of assistants, he made an intensive case study of each subject and published the statistical description of the group in the first volume of his Genetic Studies of Genius (1925). This study continued to be the central focus of Terman's work throughout the rest of his life; he carried out successive follow-ups at five- or ten-year intervals and reported the results in subsequent volumes of the series.
In 1922 Terman was appointed a head of Stanford's psychology department, a position he retained until his retirement in 1943. With the aid of a new endowment fund, he soon developed a very strong faculty, proving to be as skillful at administration as at test construction.
During the 1920's he was a co-author of the Stanford Achievement Tests, and in the 1930's he applied his talent for testing to the measurement of masculinity-femininity and to the study of marital happiness, rightly believing that these fields needed the same objectivity and quantification of methods that he had brought to intelligence and school achievement. At the time of his death, at Stanford, he was at work on volume V of the Genetic Studies of Genius; the volume was completed by his long-time research associate, Melita Oden.
With all his gentleness, he could be a fierce fighter for his ideas – when, in the early 1920's, some humanists attacked mental measurement he responded with vitriolic satire and he was likewise intemperate a decade later when research at the State University of Iowa called into question his lifelong belief in the heritability of intelligence. Beneath a quiet and modest exterior, there was a true passion for accomplishment. Terman's ambition was well fulfilled.
Terman was fundamentally a pure empiricist, with little interest in theory - and on occasion, he substituted belief for theory, as demonstrated by his early nativistic position concerning the inheritance of intelligence. His chief interest throughout his career was the art and science of mental measurement.
Quotations:
"We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."
"It is evident, therefore, that one of the most fundamental problems of psychology is that of investigating the laws of mental growth. When these laws are known, the door of the future will in a measure be opened; determination of the child's present status will enable us to forecast what manner of adult he will become."
Membership
He was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation.
He was elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association and to the National Academy of Sciences.
Personality
Terman was rather slight in build, with reddish hair, a soft voice, and a warm and engaging smile. He was a shy man, whose outward warmth masked an inner retiringness – social interaction seemed more fatiguing to him than to most men. He was intensely ambitious, however, in almost the Horatio Alger tradition. Despite his frail health he was a tireless worker, eager for achievement, and not reluctant to accept honors and money.
Connections
Lewis Terman married Anna B. Minton; they had two children.