THE STANFORD-BINET:
THE EARLY MAINSTAY OF IQ
While it was Goddard who first translated the Binet
scales in the United States, it was Stanford professor
Lewis M. Terman (1857–1956) who popularized
IQ testing with his revision of the Binet
scales in 1916. The new Stanford-Binet, as it was
called, was a substantial revision, not just an extension,
of the earlier Binet scales. Among the
many changes that led to the unquestioned prestige
of the Stanford-Binet was the use of the now familiar
IQ for expressing test results. The number of
items was increased to 90, and the new scale was
suitable for those with mental retardation, children,
and both normal and “superior” adults. In addition,
the Stanford-Binet had clear and well-organized instructions
for administration and scoring. Great
care had been taken in securing a representative
sample of subjects for use in the standardization of
the test. As Goodenough (1949) notes: “The publication
of the Stanford Revision marked the end of
the initial period of experimentation and uncertainty.
Once and for all, intelligence testing had
been put on a firm basis.”
The Stanford-Binet was the standard of intelligence
testing for decades. New tests were always
validated in terms of their correlations with this
measure. It continued its preeminence through revisions
in 1937, and 1960, by which time the Wechsler
scales (Wechsler, 1949, 1955) had begun to
compete with it. The latest revision of the Stanford-
Binet was completed in 2003. This test and the
Wechsler scales are discussed in detail in a later
chapter. It is worth mentioning here that the Wechsler
scales became a quite popular alternative to the
Stanford-Binet mainly because they provided more
than just an IQ score. In addition to Full Scale IQ,
the Wechsler scales provided ten to twelve subtest
scores, and a Verbal and Performance IQ. By contrast,
the earlier versions of the Stanford-Binet supplied
only a single overall summary score, the
global IQ.