Lewis Terman

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Lewis Terman : biography

15 January 1877 – 21 December 1956

Terman died before he completed the fifth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, but Melita Oden, a colleague, completed the volume and published it. Terman wished for the study to continue on after his death, so he selected Robert Richardson Sears, one of the many successful participants in the study as well as a colleague of his, to continue with the work. The study is still supported by Stanford University and will continue until the last of the “Termites” withdraws from the study or dies.

Biography

Terman received a B.S., B.Pd. (Bachelor of Pedagogy), and B.A. from Central Normal College in 1894 and 1898, and a B.A. and M.A. from the Indiana University Bloomington in 1903. He received his Ph.D. from Clark University in 1905.

He worked as a school principal in San Bernardino, California in 1905, and as a professor at Los Angeles Normal School in 1907. In 1910 he joined the faculty of Stanford University as a professor of educational psychology at the invitation of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley and remained associated with the university until his death. He served as chairman of the psychology department from 1922 to 1945.

Terman published the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale in 1916 and revisions were released in 1937 and 1960. Original work on the test had been completed by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon of France. Terman promoted his test, known colloquially as the "Stanford-Binet" test, as an aid for the classification of developmentally disabled children. Revisions of the Stanford-Binet are still used today as a general intelligence test for adults and children. The fifth revision of the test is currently in use.

The first mass administration of IQ testing was done with 1.7 million soldiers during World War I, when Terman served in a psychological testing role with the United States military. Terman was able to work with other applied psychologists to categorize army recruits. The recruits were given group intelligence tests which took about an hour to administer. Testing options included Army alpha, a text-based test, and Army beta, a picture-based test for nonreaders. 25% could not complete the Alpha test.Teigen, En psykologihistorie, page 235 The examiners scored the tests on a scale ranging from "A" through "E".

Recruits who earned scores of "A" would be trained as officers while those who earned scores of "D" and "E" would never receive officer training. The work of psychologists during the war proved to Americans that intelligence tests could have broader utility. After the war Terman and his colleagues pressed for intelligence tests to be used in schools to improve the efficiency of growing American schools.

He also administered English tests to Spanish-speakers and unschooled African-Americans, concluding:

“High-grade or border-line deficiency… is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes… They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (The Measurement of Intelligence, 1916, p. 91-92).

Unlike Binet and Simon, whose goal was to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track. He believed IQ was inherited and was the strongest predictor of one’s ultimate success in life. Terman adopted William Stern’s suggestion that mental age/chronological age times 100 be made the intelligence quotient or IQ. (NB: Most modern IQ tests calculate the intelligence quotient differently.)

In 1921, Terman initiated the Genetic Studies of Genius, a long-term study of gifted children. He found that gifted children did not fit the existing stereotypes often associated with them: they were not weak and sickly social misfits, but in fact were generally taller, in better health, better developed physically, and better adapted socially than other children. The children included in his studies were colloquially referred to as "Termites".

Terman later joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group founded by E.S. Gosney in 1928 which had as part of its agenda the promotion and enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California. Terman Middle School in Palo Alto, California is named after himself and his son. His son Frederick Terman, as provost of Stanford University, greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments that helped catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world’s first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley.

Recognition

Stanford University has an endowed professorship in his honor.