alfred binet intelligence testing in children

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Why did alfred binet believe that it would be misleading to take the test score of a child as an absolute measure of innate intelligence...

-- cheryl snyder-roy (csnyder-roy@dvusd.hl.org), May 02, 2002

Answers

You might check Henry Minton's commentary on Binet, Simon, and Terman on the Classics in the History of Psychology website

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Binet/commentary.htm

There is also a nice article on intelligence testing on the APA website that includes a historical perspective

http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec99/ss4.html

I think you'll find that you might want to reframe the question. From a historical perspective the important issue is not that Binet believed this, but that Terman and Simon and Goddard and others did believe in innate intelligence and that belief was used in destructive ways by the eugenics movement and by later testers of intelligence. A web search using Binet and "innate intelligence" will turn up discussions of the Jensen Controversy, Goddard's work, and numberous other debates.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), May 03, 2002.


Another interesting and popular, though controversial, account can be found in Stephen J. Gould's _The Mismeasure of Man_. See especially the chapter on Binet.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), May 03, 2002.

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