Comment Re:Abuse of IQ terminology (Score 1) 243
Lewis Terman (Wikipedia):
Early on, Terman adopted William Stern's suggestion that mental age/chronological age times 100 be made the intelligence quotient or IQ.
Revisions (mostly recently the fifth) of the Stanford-Binet remain in widespread use as a measure of general intelligence for both adults and for children.
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.
William Stern (Wikipedia:
During Stern's time, many other psychologists were working on ways to qualitatively assess individual differences. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, for instance, were developing tests to assess the mental age of children in order to identify learning disabilities, but lacked a standardized way to compare these scores across populations of children. Stern suggested a change in the formula for intelligence, which has previously been calculated using the difference between an individual's mental age and chronological age. Instead, Stern proposed dividing an individual's mental age by their chronological age to obtain a single ratio. This formula was later improved by Lewis Terman, who multiplied the intelligence quotient by 100 to obtain a whole number.[6]
It seems that the point of the IQ methodology, added on to preexisting intelligence testing, was intended to come up with a general measure that was comparable across populations. Disagree?
