At the beginning of the 20th century, several researchers established the bases to measure the intellect of the human being.
Measuring the level of intelligence of the human being took a long time, it is at the end of the 19th century when researchers begin to approach the idea of being able to measure that of each individual. As explained by Carmen Molero, Enrique Sanz and Cristina Esteban, professors at the University of Valencia, in an interesting historical review on this field, the English psychologist Francis Galton was probably the most prominent pioneer, dedicating himself during the last decades of the 19th century to the study of mental capacities.
Galton served as a basis and reference for the psychologist Alfred Binet and the psychiatrist Thèodore Simon, who were commissioned by the French government to create a simple test that could measure intellectual capacity.
In 1905, they published ‘The metric scale of intelligence’, in which they presented for the first time a series of progressive difficulty tests adapted to the response capacity corresponding to each age.
To measure intelligence, participants had to solve tasks that required a progressive mastery of vocabulary and a certain level of understanding and arithmetic ability.
As can be seen in the previous image, these tests were divided by age. Binet continued to refine his test, publishing revisions in subsequent years that included changes to the tests by age.
Henry Hebert Goddard, continued the study and although he did not contribute any definitive change to the analysis of the numerical results of the tests, it was essential to disseminate the work of Binet and Simon in the United States. In 1908, he published ‘The Binet and Simon Intellectual Ability Tests’ with his version of the scale.
Later, William Stern, a German psychologist and philosopher, pioneer of critical personalism, is considered the inventor of the famous intellectual quotient (IQ) after proposing that the results of tests such as those of Binet and Simon were not a simple difference between their mental age and its chronological age but a division of the first by the second to obtain a unique proportion.
In 1916 the American psychologist Lewis Terman suggested that, in addition to dividing the mental age by the chronological age, that quotient be multiplied by 100 and thus obtain the number without decimals that serves us today as a reference when we talk about test results . (AND)
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