INTELLIGENCE TESTING, HISTORY OF
INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT
The intelligence quotient represents a measurement concept
that was used extensively in the early days of intelligence
testing but is less commonly used today. After Alfred Binet’s
death in 1911, Stern (1914) introduced the notion of a mental
quotient, suggesting that the index of intellectual function-
ing derived from the Binet-Simon Scale could be expressed
as the ratio of a test taker’s mental age to his or her chrono-
logical age multiplied by 100 to eliminate decimals (MQ =
100 × MA/ CA). This MQ represented something about a
person’s rate of mental growth up to the time of the test. If
examinees earned a mental age (MA) equivalent to chrono-
logical age (CA), their mental quotient (MQ) would be 100.
An MQ of 100 represented average performance.
Working at Stanford University in California, Lewis M.
Terman developed what was to become the most widely used
American version of the Binet test, the Stanford-Binet. Ter-
man (1916) incorporated Stern’s notion of a mental quotient
but renamed it, calling it a ratio intelligence quotient, or
IQ.
The concept of the ratio intelligence quotient became
increasingly popular, but it was used in a number of inap-
propriate ways. Its decline over the last quarter century
can be attributed to a number of inherent characteristics
that have been highly criticized by measurement specialists
and practitioners.
Because the ratio intelligence quotient has minor differ-
ences in the magnitude of its standard deviation at various
ages, a constant intelligence quotient from one age to an-
other does not represent the same relative status. Similarly,
even if the test taker’s relative status remained the same
from one year to another, the intelligence quotient would
have to change. This suggests that intelligence quotients at
different age levels are not comparable statistically (Tyler &
Walsh, 1979). For example, a very bright child could obtain a
higher IQ at age 12 than at age 6, even if the child’s growth
rate was unchanged. This difference would simply be due
to the differences in the variability or standard deviations,
with the variability of the IQ distribution being greater for
12 year olds than for 6 year olds.
Critics also point to the conceptual difficulty of the ratio
intelligence quotient. For example, a 5 year old with a men-
tal age of 6 and a 10 year old with a mental age of 12 would
both have identical intelligence quotients of 120. However,
the 6 year old is a year advanced in mental age while the
10 year old is 2 years advanced.
Another criticism of the intelligence quotient relates to
its inability to describe adult intelligence (Tyler & Walsh,
1979). Critics suggest that like physical growth, adult men-
tal growth lacks the predictable regularity characteristic
of the mental development of children. Age standards lack
meaning after the mid-teens, rendering mental age and
therefore the intelligence quotient concept meaningless.
Owing to these criticisms of the ratio intelligence quo-
1127
tient, most major intelligence tests today yield IQs but not
ratio intelligence quotients. For example, since the 1960 re-
vision of the Stanford-Binet, the ratio intelligence quotient
has been replaced by the deviation IQ. Major intelligence
tests such as the Wechsler and McCarthy scales and the
Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) do not
yield ratio intelligence quotients. However, several other
intelligence tests in use today retain the concept of the ratio
intelligence quotient, including the Leiter International
Performance Scale, the Slosson Intelligence Test, and the
Quick Test. Because of the inherent limitations of the ratio
intelligence quotient, IQs yielded from these tests should
be interpreted cautiously.
REFERENCES
Stern, W. (1914). The psychological methods of testing intelligence.
Baltimore: Warwick & York.
Terman, L. M. (1916). The measurement of intelligence. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Tyler, L. E., & Walsh, W. B. (1979). Tests and measurements. Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
MARK E. SWERDLIK
Illinois State University
DEVIATION IQ
IQ
RATIO IQ
INTELLIGENCE TESTING, HISTORY OF
Intelligence testing, although called by many different
names and used in many different forms, has been around
for many centuries (Anastasi, 1982). The Chinese have
been using mental tests for 3,000 years, and in the sev-
enth and eighth centuries the Imperial Court established
tests of speaking and writing and verbal and nonverbal
reasoning that are similar to tasks on today’s tests. The
ancient Greeks, followers of Socrates, and universities in
the Middle Ages, all developed methods of assessing intel-
lectual skills.
As summarized by Kaufman (1983), the 1800s saw the
beginning of the development of ideas about mental abili-
ties and methods of measuring intelligence; these ideas
formed the foundation for contemporary assessment. Not
surprisingly, the scholars involved in the roots of intelligence
testing were concerned with the two extremes of ability.
Jean Esquirol in the early 1800s and Edouard Seguin in
the mid-1800s, two French physicians, studied intelligence
of mentally retarded individuals. Francis Galton, in the
mid-to-late 1800s, focused on the ability of men of genius.
1128 INTELLIGENCE TESTING, HISTORY OF
In the 1890s, James McKeen Cattell brought intelligence
testing to the United States.
Esquirol’s contributions included distinguishing between
those people with very low intelligence, or the mentally
retarded, and those people with emotional disturbances.
He indicated that there is a hierarchy of retardation along
a continuum, and coined terms like imbecile and idiot to
describe different levels of mental deficiency. Although
Esquirol studied several procedures, he concluded that a
person’s use of language is the most dependable criterion
for determining intelligence, a philosophy that is apparent
on many intelligence tests today.
Seguin rejected the notion that mental retardation is in-
curable and served as a pioneer in education for the mentally
retarded. Unlike Esquirol, Seguin stressed the importance
of sensory discrimination and motor control as aspects of
intelligence. He developed procedures that were adopted
by later developers of performance and nonverbal intel-
ligence tests. An example is the Seguin Form board, which
requires rapid placement of variously shaped blocks into
their correct holes.
The English biologist Galton was primarily responsible
for developing the first comprehensive individual intelli-
gence test. As part of his research of men of genius and the
heredity of intelligence, he administered tasks of sensory
discrimination and sensory motor coordination in his An-
thropometric Laboratory. His belief that intelligence comes
to us through the senses led to the development of tasks
such as weight discrimination, reaction time, strength of
squeeze, and visual discrimination.
In the early 1890s, Cattell, an assistant in Galton’s
laboratory, established similar laboratories in the United
States. During this time, Cattell used the term mental test
for the first time in the psychological literature. Cattell
shared Galton’s view that intelligence is best measured
through sensory tasks, but expanded his mentor’s ideas by
emphasizing that test administration must be standardized
so that results are comparable from person to person and
time to time.
In the early 1900s, significant advances were made in
both individual and group intelligence testing (Sattler, 1982;
Vane & Motta, 1984). In France, Alfred Binet, assisted by
Theophile Simon and Victor Henri, rejected Galton’s no-
tions about the sensory and motor aspects of intelligence
and claimed that tests of higher mental processes more
effectively distinguish among the individual differences in
people’s intellectual abilities. This group developed numer-
ous tests of complex intellectual functions such as memory,
comprehension, imagination, and moral sentiments. The
specific appointment by the French minister of public in-
struction to study the education of retarded children led
to the development of the individually administered Bi-
net-Simon Scale in 1905, constructed to separate mentally
retarded and normal children in the Paris public schools.
Two of the key aspects of Binet’s approach to intelligence
testing were that he “discarded the specific test for the spe-
cific ability and took a group of tests which seemed to cover
in general the chief psychological characteristics that go to
make up intelligence. And, further, as the norm or standard
of intelligence he took what the average child at each age
could do” (Pintner & Patterson, 1925, p. 7).
The Binet-Simon Scale, including the 1911 revision
that extended through adulthood, was almost immediately
adapted and translated in the United States. The most suc-
cessful revision was Terman’s Stanford-Binet Scale in 1916.
Terman carefully standardized his scale and introduced
the application of the term intelligence quotient (mental
age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100). The
Stanford-Binet was widely adopted by individual examiners
in the United States, and it is still popular today. The Binet
was revised and restandardized in 1937, revised in 1960,
and again restandardized in 1972. The ratio IQ, although
retained in the 1937 Binet, was replaced by the deviation IQ
(a standard score with a mean of 100 and standard deviation
of 16) for the 1960 and 1972 Stanford-Binets. A thoroughly
new version of the Binet was released in 2004.
David Wechsler, in 1939, was the first to challenge the
Stanford-Binet monopoly on individual intelligence tests by
publishing the Wechsler-Bellevue Scale. Wechsler, like Binet,
included the concept of global intelligence in his scale, but
instead of having one score, as did the Stanford-Binet, he
included three scores: a verbal IQ, a performance IQ, and a
full-scale IQ. Wechsler did not employ the methodology of
the Stanford-Binet, which used a large number of brief and
primarily verbal tasks. His scale was limited to a small num-
ber of longer tasks, half of them verbal and half nonverbal.
Several versions of the Wechsler scales have been published
since his Wechsler-Bellevue, and the types of tasks on later
versions are virtually identical to the first scale. The main
sources of Wechsler’s verbal tasks were the Binet and the
Army Group Examination Alpha; his performance tests came
primarily from the Army Group Examination Beta and the
Army Individual Performance Scale Examination.
The widespread use of group intelligence tests began,
like the first Binet Scale, to meet a practical need (Anas-
tasi, 1982). The entry of the United States into World War
I in 1917 required a rapid means of classifying 1.5 million
recruits for assignment into different types of training, dis-
charge from service, and officer ability. A committee of the
American Psychological Association, headed by Robert M.
Yerkes, was directed to develop two group intelligence
tests; these came to be known as the Army Alpha and Army
Beta. The former, a verbal test modeled after the Binet,
was designed for general use with literate recruits; the
latter employed nonverbal items and was designed for il-
literate recruits, or those recent immigrants who did not
speak English well. (The Army Individual Performance
Scale, mentioned previously, was given to those recruits
who could not be tested validly on either the Army Alpha
or Army Beta.)
 INTELLIGENCE TESTING, HISTORY OF
The tests were released for civilian use soon after the
war ended. Because of the belief that intelligence tests were
better than teacher evaluations for identifying abilities,
these tests became widely accepted in education (Vane &
Motta, 1984). A short time after, revisions of the Army tests,
as well as new group intelligence tests that used the Army
tests as models, were being administered to thousands of
preschool through graduate students all over the country,
and to special adult groups such as employees or prisoners.
The group format was attractive because it allowed the
testing of many individuals simultaneously and it incorpo-
rated simple administration procedures that required little
examiner training. The rapid growth of group intelligence
testing resulted in the development of 37 group tests in only
5 years! (Pintner, 1923).
A new surge in group intelligence testing occurred in
1958, after the launching of Sputnik. The passage of the
National Defense Education Act provided funds for states to
test the abilities of schoolchildren and identify outstanding
students. This testing was facilitated by the development
of optical scanning for test scoring by Lindquist in 1955.
Also in 1958, the National Merit Scholarship program was
established to select exceptional high-school students. Ac-
cording to Vane and Motta (1984), another significant up-
turn in testing happened in the late 1970s, and this interest
continues to this day.
Intelligence tests, both group and individual, are used in
many different ways today. The largest users of intelligence
tests are schools. Group intelligence tests are used at the
preschool and kindergarten levels to distinguish children
who are ready to participate in educational activities from
those who need remedial preparation. At the elementary,
middle, and high-school levels, group tests are used to iden-
tify exceptional students, and to aid in forming homoge-
neous ability groups within classrooms. Group intelligence
tests are commonly used as one criterion for admission into
colleges and universities. Individual intelligence tests have
been administered for over half a century by well-trained
clinicians for psychological, psychoeducational, and neuro-
psychological diagnosis. The passage of the Education of All
Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (PL 94-142) and subse-
quent revisions resulted in the common use of individual
intelligence tests as part of larger assessment batteries for
the placement of children in special education programs
for the mentally retarded, learning disabled, emotionally
disturbed, and so forth, and for the development of indi-
vidual educational programs for these children. However,
the latest revision in 2004 signaled less reliance on testing
and more reliance on prereferral intervention and alternate
forms of assessment such as curriculum-based assessment.
For adults, group and individual intelligence tests are used
in a variety of settings, including business and industry,
prisons, mental health centers, hospitals, and private clini-
cal practice.
Group intelligence tests find their principal application
1129
in education, business, government, and military, in cir-
cumstances where it is feasible to obtain valid test data
from many individuals at once; they are useful as well with
individuals who are able to take a test by themselves with-
out need of an examiner. In contrast, individual intelligence
tests are used in clinics and special education centers, where
an intensive study of individual clients is needed and a
trained examiner is necessary to secure valid test results.
The reasons for using group and individual tests are many
and provide a basis for understanding the type of informa-
tion provided by the two testing formats. A summary of these
reasons, as reported by Anastasi (1982), follows.
Group tests can be administered to a large number of
individuals at the same time by using booklets of printed
items and forms for the examinee to indicate his or her an-
swer. The training and experience required by the examiner
is minimal, as most group tests only require the examiner
to read simple instructions and accurately keep time. The
minimal role of the examiner in group testing provides more
uniform testing conditions than in individual testing.
Objective scoring is a key aspect of group tests. Test
items are usually multiple choice, true-false, or some other
type that produces responses that can be scored as correct
or incorrect with no deliberation. Items on group tests can
usually be scored by a clerk or a computer. In addition,
group tests typically include answer sheets, separate from
the test booklets that contain the items, allowing economical
reuse of test booklets.
Because group tests can be administered to large groups
of individuals at the same time, larger numbers of indi-
viduals can be used in the standardization programs for
group tests than for individual tests. Group test norms
are generally better established because they are based on
standardization samples of 100,000 to 200,000 instead of
the 1,000 to 4,000 used for individual tests.
On the other hand, individual intelligence tests have
several characteristics that make them suitable for a variety
of clinical purposes. In individual testing, the examiner has
the opportunity to obtain cooperation, establish rapport,
and enhance motivation of the examinee. The trained ex-
aminer in individual testing detects, reports, and uses in
the interpretation of test scores the many characteristics
of the examinee that may affect test performance such as
anxiety, fatigue, and problem-solving style. In addition,
some individuals such as emotionally disturbed and men-
tally retarded children and adults may perform better on
individual tests than on group tests. Since most group tests
require the examinee to read instructions and test items,
individually administered tests, which demand little or no
reading, are especially useful for learning-disabled and
retarded individuals, and others who may have reading
problems.
Individual intelligence tests, because they typically in-
clude short questions that require oral and open-ended
responses, allow examinees to give creative and original
1130 INTELLIGENCE TESTING
responses to items. In individual testing, examinees are
not limited to selecting one of four multiple choice answers
or indicating if an item is true or false. The contents of an
examinee’s response on an individual intelligence test can
therefore be analyzed in order to generate hypotheses about,
for example, the examinee’s creativity, style of thinking,
cognitive development, or defense mechanisms.
Another aspect of individual intelligence testing concerns
the flexibility of administration. On a group test, an exam-
inee is required to respond to all items, or as many items as
he or she can in a certain time limit. On an individual test,
testing time is more effectively used because the examinee
is administered only those items in the range appropriate
to his or her ability level. This characteristic of individual
tests helps avoid the boredom an examinee may have when
working on items that are too easy or the frustration of
working on items that are too difficult.
Intelligence testing has been a controversial topic since the
1960s (Kaufman, 1979). The most pressing issues that are de-
bated within both professional and public forums concern test
bias, the influence of heredity versus environment on IQ, race
differences in test scores, and disproportionate placement of
minority children into special education classes such as those
for the retarded or gifted. These issues have been the subject
of research, debate, federal guidelines, laws, and lawsuits.
Just as major law cases differ on whether intelligence tests
are unfair to minority children (Larry P. v. Riles; PASE deci-
sion in Chicago), so do professionals in the field of intelligence
testing continue to disagree on these issues. It is likely that
the future will be filled with arguments on the appropriate
use of intelligence tests (Fletcher & Reschly, 2005; Kavale,
Kaufman, Naglieri, & Hale, 2005) and claims that they should
be banned; at the same time, it is equally certain that there
will continue to be a proliferation of new and revised instru-
ments of both the individual and group variety.
REFERENCES
Anastasi, A. (1982). Psychological testing (5th ed.). New York: Mac-
millan.
Fletcher, J., & Reschly, D. J. (2005). Changing procedures for iden-
tifying learning disabilities: The danger of perpetually old ideas.
The School Psychologist, 59, 1, 10–15.
Kaufman, A. S. (1979). Intelligent testing with the WISC-R. New
York: Wiley.
Kaufman, A. S. (1983). Intelligence: Old concepts—new perspec-
tives. In G. W. Hynd (Ed.), The school psychologist: An introduc-
tion (pp. 95–117). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Kavale, K., Kaufman, A. S., Naglieri, J. A., & Hale, J. B. (2003).
Changing procedures for identifying learning disabilities: The
danger of poorly supported ideas. The School Psychologist, 59,
1, 16–25.
Pintner, R. (1923). Intelligence testing. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
& Winston.
Pintner, R., & Patterson, D. G. (1925). A scale of performance. New
York: Appleton.
Sattler, J. M. (1982). Assessment of children’s intelligence and spe-
cial abilities (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Thorndike, R. L. (1985, April). An introduction to the revised
Stanford-Binet for school psychology educators. Paper presented
at the conference of the Trainers of School Psychologists, Las
Vegas, NV.
Vane, T. R., & Motta, R. W. (1984). Group intelligence tests. In
G. Goldstein & M. Hersen (Eds.), Handbook of psychological
assessment (pp. 100–116). New York: Pergamon.
ALAN S. KAUFMAN
Yale University Medical School
PATTI L. HARRISON
University of Alabama
INTELLIGENCE
INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT
INTELLIGENT TESTING
SEE SPECIFIC TESTS
INTELLIGENCE TESTING
The practice of formally testing skills and abilities dates
back nearly 3,000 years (Wang, 1993). Moreover, individual
differences in human performance have been discussed
among history’s greatest thinkers, including Socrates, Plato,
and Darwin. Despite a history of interest in exploring hu-
man abilities, standardized and validated intelligence tests
first were developed in 1905 by Binet and Simon to help
predict how well children would achieve in school (French
& Hale, 1990). Since then, the intelligence testing move-
ment has gained considerable momentum as a result of the
need to differentiate among individuals when providing
educational services (French & Hale, 1990).
Intelligence testing is a means to observe the actual
performance of individuals under standardized conditions.
Its purpose is to accurately assess cognitive strengths and
weaknesses. However, individual scores are samples of
behavior. In addition, many other nonintellective factors
influence everyday functioning and behavior. As a result,
intelligence testing is used to make inferences and predic-
tions about an individual’s ability rather than serve as a
direct indicator of the traits and capacities of an individual
(Sattler, 1992).
Standardized measures of intelligence are used by psy-
chologists on a daily basis. Data from intelligence tests
often are used to predict school performance, especially
achievement. Intelligence tests do this fairly well (Neisser
et al., 1996). Approximately 25 percent of the variance as-
sociated with achievement can be attributed to intelligence.
Although 75 percent of the variance in school performance