Intelligence and Giftedness

test in 1905, which tapped several abilities related to intellect, such as judgment and reasoning, the test determined a given child’s mental age’, the test previously established a norm for children of a given physical age. (for example, five-year-olds on average get ten items correct), therefore, a child with a mental age of five should score 10, which would mean that he or she was functioning pretty much as others of that age. The child’s mental age was then compared to his physical age. B A large disparity in the wrong direction (e.g., a child of nine with a mental age of four) might suggest inability rather than laziness and mean he or she was earmarked for special schooling, Binet, however, denied that the test was measuring intelligence, its purpose was simply diagnostic, for selection only. This message was however lost, and caused many problems and misunderstanding later. C Although Binet’s test was popular, it was a bit inconvenient to deal with a variety of physical and mental ages. So in 1912 Wilhelm Stem suggested simplifying this by reducing die two to a single number, he divided the mental age by the physical age, and multiplied the result by 100. An average child, irrespective of age, would score 100.…