Intelligence and Giftedness

In 1904 the French minister of education, facing limited resources for schooling, sought a way to separate the unable from the merely lazy. Alfred Binet got the job of devising selection principles and his brilliant solution put a stamp on the study of intelligence and was the forerunner of intelligence tests still used today, he developed a thirty-problem test in 1905, which tapped several abilities related to intellect, such as judgment and reasoning, the test determined a given child’s mental age’. The test previously established a norm for children of a given physical age. (for example, five-year-old on average get ten items correct), therefore, a child with a mental age of five should score 10, which would mean that he or she was functioning pretty much as others of that age. The child’s mental age was then compared to his physical age. large disparity in the wrong direction (e.g., a child of nine with a mental age of four) might suggest inability rather than laziness and mean he or she was earmarked for special schooling, Binet, however, denied that the test was measuring intelligence, its purpose was simply diagnostic, for selection only. This message was however lost and caused many problems and misunderstanding later. Although Binet’s test was popular, it was a bit inconvenient to deal with a variety of physical and mental ages. So in 1912, Wilhelm Stern suggested simplifying this by reducing the two to a single number, he divided the mental age by the physical age and multiplied the result by 100. An average child, irrespective of age, would score 100. A number…