Subsequently there was an increase in jobs and funding in psychology. However, a great deal of positive post war publicity on army psychological testing helped to make psychology a respected field. The army abolished Yerkes' team after the war but employed two psychologists to continue intelligence testing research. By the time the war ended they had already been incorporated into the military and had classified 3½ million men and assigned 973,858 to technical units. The army was enthusiastic about Scott's classification of personnel. Soon they developed a rating scale to classify and place enlisted men according to how they used their intelligence, not their base levels of intelligence. They stressed an individual differences approach emphasizing environmental adjustments of mental qualities as functions. In contrast, another team of psychologists led by Walter Dill Scott defined intelligence as a diverse complex of capacities, as Binet had. The outcome was that 0.5% of recruits were discharged as mentally inferior, whilst Yerkes would have preferred to have discharged 3% whose results showed a mental age of under 10. Orders were issued that low test scores should not bar men from officer training and that a disability board should consider all discharges. Many officers distrusted the psychologists, accusing them of conducting research for their own purposes using culturally biased tests. However, there was too little time for validity testing and not enough staff to administer tests correctly. They successfully tested 1,726,000 recruits. They developed two group-administered intelligence tests for this purpose: an alpha test for literate personnel and a beta for the illiterate. World War I: large scale testingĪ team of psychologists led by eugenicist Robert Yerkes assisted the US army to rapidly assess and assign huge numbers of personnel. American psychologist Lewis Terman revised the Binet-Simon scale, implementing German psychologist William Stern's intelligence quotient (I.Q.) ratio of mental age to chronological age and used the resulting Stanford-Binet scale as a measure of general intelligence. Goddard published a translation of it that same year. In 1910 the eugenics movement in the USA seized on the Binet-Simon test as means to give them credibility in diagnosing mental retardation after American psychologist Henry H. He devised a correlational formula to define a common intellective factor (which he called "general intelligence"), a factor that Binet argued did not exist. Intelligence testingĮnglish psychologist Charles Spearman, however, did not believe there were different types of intelligence. Binet-Simon tasks were diverse in order to neutralize individual differences in types of intelligence and provide a general measure. Binet and fellow French psychologist Théodore Simon later developed the Binet-Simon test for measuring intellectual development or mental age to diagnose French children in need of special assistance classes. Clinical diagnosticsįrench psychologist Alfred Binet gave more weight to nurture, arguing that intelligence could be improved. Galton argued that due to heredity, white aristocrats were intellectually superior to other humans nurture, meanwhile, played a lesser role in intellectual capacity. History PsychometricsĮnglishman Francis Galton, influenced by Darwinism, founded eugenics (and later psychometrics) to measure differences between upper and lower classes. It is disputed whether these changes in scores reflect real changes in intellectual abilities, or merely methodological problems with past or present testing. The average IQ scores for many populations have been rising at an average rate of three points per decade since the early 20th century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |