Placentation Research - Meng Hu's Blog

CHAPTER 2
1960s. But Wechsler chipped away at the monopoly, and overtook
the Binet during the 1960s as the learning disabilities
movement and the emergent field of neuropsychology gained
popularity. Psychologists and educators were no longer content
with a single IQ. They wanted a profile of scores to help
identify the strengths and weaknesses that are known to characterize
children with specific learning disabilities or SLDs (although
even this long-held belief is now a hotly debated topic;
see chapter 9). Wechsler’s 10+ subtests provided the profile of
scores that the one-score Binet lacked. And Wechsler’s separate
Verbal IQ and Performance IQ helped identify bright children
with SLDs who had language difficulties (high Performance IQ)
or visual- perceptual problems (high Verbal IQ). The Stanford-
Binet offered just one IQ, and the test was so verbally oriented
that people with exceptional nonverbal intelligence were unfairly
penalized. My colleague John Willis (personal communication,
October 9, 2008) has a hypothesis as to why the original
Stanford-Binet was so oriented toward verbal ability: “I have
heard that Terman was a klutz and struggled with the brass instruments
of the psychology laboratory in graduate school. Perhaps
his high verbal and weak performance abilities influenced
his selection of tests.”
Ultimately, Wechsler triumphed over the Binet because he
tried harder. He never stopped improving his tests or using the
most advanced statistical techniques. When I was an assistant director
at The Psychological Corporation in the early 1970s and
helped Dr. Wechsler develop the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for
Children—Revised (WISC-R; Wechsler, 1974), he was in his mid-
70s and as active and involved in his tests as ever. He showed
me notebooks filled with new items, including comic strips he
had cut out from newspapers to adapt for nonverbal test items.
With his own tool kit, he had constructed a variety of wooden
dolls and formboards, always in search of new ways of measuring
mental ability.
Dr. Wechsler (I never called him David) was the most important
influence in my professional life. I told the following
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