Our concept of intelligence is a product of the history of intelligence testing, which is among the most controversial issues in psychology: whether tests can measure and quantify a person's abilities and how widely the results can be used fairly.
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The modern intelligence-testing movement began when the pioneering French psychologist Alfred Binet began assessing intellectual abilities. To minimize bias, France’s minister of public education in 1904 commissioned Binet his partner Theodore Simon to study a problem caused by differences in students on the same class. Binet and Simon decided to develop an objective test to identify children likely to have difficulty in the regular classes. They assumed that all children follow the same course of intellectual development, but some develop more rapidly. Both scientists set out to measure what came to be called a child’s mental age - the chronological age typical of a given level of performance. Yet Binet insisted that it did not measure inborn intelligence as a meterstick measures height. Rather, the test has a single practical purpose: to identify french schoolchildren needing special attention.
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After Binet’s death, Stanford University professor Lewis Terman revised his work for use in the United States. He adapted some of Binet's original items, added others, established new age norms, and extended the upper end of the test's range from teenagers to "superior adults". Terman believed his Stanford-Binet could help guide people toward appropriate opportunities, but-unlike Binet- he was biased by his belief that intelligence was inherited. Terman promoted the widespread use of intelligence testing.
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For such tests, German psychologist William Stern derived the famous intelligent quotient, or IQ. He was the inventor of the concept of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, later used by Lewis Terman and others.