Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Lewis Madison Terman 221
endowed” children so as to give the extra support needed for them to cope. In the United States
other psychologists such as Henry Goddard, Robert Yerkes, and Lewis Terman were fixated on
the higher echelon, the “highly gifted.” These positions used similar techniques and shared the
same basic assumption that intelligence in humans was a natural endowment that varied from
individual to individual. While it is fair to say that both approaches were aimed at the ultimate
good of the society, it is pertinent to note that the focus on the least endowed individual has
a social justice slant, that is to say, provide special education for those who need it and level
the gaps in achievement. While the quest for the highly gifted possessed an elitist slant, its
proponents, Terman included, sought to control or eradicate the existence and reproduction of
the least endowed. Furthermore, the former used the IQ tests to determine what a child needed to
learn while the latter used the IQ tests as a tool to predict the child’s ability to learn.
If individual intelligence levels could be clearly ascertained then the population can be sorted
on the basis of their IQ test scores and assigned to different levels within the school system,
which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adulthood. The explanation
of these variances on the part of the gifted school was dependent on bloodline, racial or gene
superiority as espoused in “Eugenics,” a popular and emergent theory at the time. As stated by
Charles Davenport (Galton’s U.S. disciple), Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the
human race by better breeding. Terman was very open about his position that the etiology of
intelligence is largely hereditary. Terman more than any other individual in recent history raised
the bar on standardized tests and its uses in schooling to track and differentiate the college bound
from the vocational or life adjustment education of children.
The use of IQ tests gained more grounds as a result of two notable events. First, the Congressional
bill or Immigration Act of 1924: Henry H. Goddard discovered that more than 80 percent
of the Jewish, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, and Russian immigrants were mentally defective, or
feeble-minded. He believed that such a defect was a condition of the mind or brain, which is
simply transmitted as a genetic trait. He paid no attention to other factors that may have had a
significant effect on the test scores. Tests were administered in English and under an arduous
environment to immigrants after traveling great distances. “It would be impossible to rate real
intelligence by using a test that is based on only verbal skills to someone in a language they are
illiterate in.” (Judge, 2002)
Secondly, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1927 upholding Virginia State’s involuntary sterilization
of Ms. Carrie Buck, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned, “Three generations
of imbeciles are enough. ... He had decided that it was constitutionally legal for states to sterilize
anyone they decided was eugenically undesirable. The principle that sustains compulsory
vaccination, he elaborated, is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.” In other words,
the general health of society could be protected at the expense of the rights of individuals. This
ruling gave further legitimacy to the claims of the advocates of mental testing.
Terman, in his seminal work “Giftedness,” on human intelligence and achievement, would go a
step further and combine the Binet–Simon Scale with Wilhelm Stern’s numerical index to explain
the ratio between mental and chronological ages. The result of this effort is the development of
the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, employing among other kinds of tests the Stanford–Binet
Scale.
U.S. ARMY ALPHA BETA TEST
In 1917 at the onset of the First World War, then APA president Robert M. Yerkes, assumed
chairmanship of a committee comprising 40 psychologists to develop and administer a group
intelligence test, the U.S. Army Alpha Beta tests. Notable members included Henry Goddard,
Walter Bingham, Lewis Terman, Carl Brigham, Edward L. Thorndike, and William Dill Scott,