Lewis Madison Terman , 1877-1956, American psychologist, b. Johnson co., Ind., grad. Indiana Univ., 1902, Ph.D. Clark Univ., 1905. He joined the faculty of Stanford in 1910 and was chairman of the psychology department from 1922 to 1942, when he retired. In World War I he served as a major and helped to deal with psychological testing. He is best known for his application of intelligence tests to schoolchildren, and for his chief work, the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Tests (1916; with Maud A. Merrill, 2d rev., 1937; 3d rev. 1960). He also wrote The Intelligence of School Children (1919), Genetic Studies of Genius (with others, 3 vol., 1925-30), and Sex and Personality (with C. M. Cox, 1936, repr. 1968).

Lewis Madison Terman

Lewis Madison Terman (1877-1956) was an eminent American psychologist who is most noted for his profound and lasting impact on the measurement of intelligence and achievement in the United States and for his seminal studies of children of high intelligence.

Lewis Madison Terman was born on a farm in Johnson County, Indiana, on January 15, 1877. He was the 12th of 14 children. Though he did not dislike farming, he loved to read and had a pressing desire for education. When he was 15 he left the farm to enter Central Normal College at Danville, Illinois. Following two years of study there, he taught for one year in a one-room schoolhouse. For several years he cycled through periodic schooling followed by borrowing money or teaching to earn enough money to return to college. He acquired B.S., B. PD., and A.B. degrees from Indiana University and a doctoral degree from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He died of tuberculosis on December 21, 1956.

Terman is most well remembered for his accomplishments in intelligence and achievement testing and for his classic longitudinal research on gifted children. Early in his career as professor of psychology and of education at Stanford University Terman studied the then new Binet-Simon Scale of Intelligence and developed it for use in the United States. Published in 1916 as the Stanford-Binet, the revision of the French intelligence test was the first important and widely used individual intelligence test in the United States. It was described in his book The Measurement of Intelligence: An Explanation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (1916). The Stanford-Binet became a standard against which other intelligence tests were still measured in the mid-1980s. Working with other psychologists during World War I, Terman was largely responsible for the first notable group intelligence tests, the Army Alpha and the Army Beta. Terman also published the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability (1920), and he co-authored the Stanford Achievement Test, which was revised many times and continued to be widely used in the 1980s.

Terman defined intelligence as "the ability to carry on abstract thinking" (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1921) and used the label IQ or Intelligence Quotient, which had been suggested earlier by the German psychologist William Stern. The IQ obtained from the Stanford-Binet was calculated by dividing the individual's mental age (obtained from the test) by chronological age and then multiplying by 100. An average IQ is 100.

Terman's classic research on gifted children began in 1921 when he started to study the development of 1, 500 California children whose IQs were over 140. Scores over 140 fall into the top 0.5 percent of the population. Terman followed the 1, 500 children at later times in their childhood and in adulthood for the rest of his life, with follow-up surveys conducted in 1930, 1947, and, posthumously, in 1959 when the individuals were 17, 35, and 45. Research on the same group of individuals is still being conducted by other psychologists and may continue for many more years.

Terman's studies undoubtedly are still the most recognized and frequently quoted research on the gifted. Some say his most significant contribution to education and psychology was the multi-volume Genetic Studies of Genius (volumes from 1925 to 1929). His last progress report on this continuing study was The Gifted Child Grows Up (1947).

Among Terman's most interesting findings from his study of the development of gifted children were that they tended to be healthier and more stable emotionally than the average child and that intellect and later life achievement were not highly related—the gifted children later pursued a wide range of occupations.

Terman's interest in scientific measurement was also exemplified in his lesser known development of scales of masculinity, of femininity, and of marital happiness. He used such scales to address research issues such as the development of masculinity and femininity over time, links between the degrees of masculinity or femininity and various occupations, and factors contributing to marital happiness.

Further Reading

Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences, 1959) gives an excellent and comprehensive account of Terman's life and work. The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (1968) also provides a concise summary on Terman and his research. Perhaps the best account of Terman's life up to 1931 is autobiographical, found in L. M. Terman, A History of Psychology in Autobiography (1932). The Encyclopedia of Educational Research (1982) cites Terman's work and his contributions to education and psychology in the context of other related work and from an historical perspective. An appraisal of his contributions is in E. R. Hilgard, "Lewis Madison Terman: 1877-1956, " American Journal of Psychology 70 (1957). Later results from the ongoing study of the 1, 500 gifted children are presented alongside a portrayal of Terman's life and his conclusions regarding gifted people in Psychology Today 13 (February 1980).

Additional Sources

Minton, Henry L., Lewis M. Terman: pioneer in psychological testing, New York: New York University Press, 1988. □

TERMAN, LEWIS MADISON 1877-1956

Pioneer of intelligence tests

Educational Psychology

Lewis Madison Terman was an educational psychologist known for his long-term study of highly intelligent individuals. Born in Johnson County, Indiana, on 15 January 1877, Terman received his Ph.D. at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. (Clark University, under the leadership of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, was at that time a hotbed of American psychology.) Terman's thesis was based on his investigation of the differences between groups of bright and dull children on a wide range of tests. After graduating from Clark, Terman, who had tuberculosis, went west on the advice of his physician. He settled in California and joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1910, where he stayed until his retirement in 1942.

The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test

In 1916 he revised the Binet-Simon intelligence test, which then became known as the Stanford-Binet test, and introduced the term intelligence quotient (IQ). Performance on the original Binet test, originated by the French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1905, was expressed on an age scale. A basal age was established by an individual's ability to pass an initial set of tests; additional months of credit were applied for tests passed above the basal age level. The result was a designation of "mental age." Terman considered it necessary to have an index that related the mental age level to the typical performance of the individual's age group. For this purpose he adopted the intelligence quotient, or IQ_, in his modified test. The ratio of mental age (MA) to chronological age (CA) provided an index of relative performance. An average adult would have an IQ of 100, with a mentally defective IQ defined as 40 or below and a gifted IQ_as 160 or above.

Revisions

The first Stanford-Binet test, published in 1916, was based almost entirely on the results of Terman's experiments with one thousand children and four hundred adults in his sample group. He then added new items, including a vocabulary test. The Literary Digest ran Terman's vocabulary as a sort of do-it-yourself intelligence test in its 16 February 1918 issue, titled, "Of Course You Are a Superior Adult." Terman created his vocabulary list by selecting the last word of every sixth column in a dictionary containing 18,000 words and arranging them roughly in the order of their difficulty. He calculated that each word in his list represented 180 words of vocabulary; therefore a person who knew 50 of these would in all probability have a working vocabulary of about 9,000 words,

IQs of the Deceased

Terman put great emphasis on his figuring of the numerical score, or IQ. He was convinced that the IQ_ stayed the same throughout an individual's life, and so adult intelligence could be predicted in early childhood. He and a Stanford associate, Catherine Cox, decided that they could estimate the IQs of a group of three hundred famous people who were long dead. Not only did they say that these individuals had high IQs, but they assigned each an exact number: Da Vinci, 180; Galileo, 185; Lincoln, 150; and Goethe, 210. Since the "science of the IQ" was held in high regard, their study was solemnly received.

Large-Scale Studies

The Stanford-Binet scale and its subsequent revisions by Terman and Maud A. Merril became the most widely used of all mental tests for children. An adaptation of it was put together in a period of a few weeks for U.S. Army recruits in 1917. In the 1920s Terman began his studies of fifteen hundred of the brightest children in California, with IQs of 135 and up, and traced their careers and accomplishments in four volumes of Genetic Studies of Genius (1925-1959).

Controversy

Results of the Stanford-Binet test have been fairly consistent with respect to individual performance over a period of years, This stability led to the test's acceptance and its widespread application as a measure of intelligence, Some critics claim the test was oversold in the beginning and had capabilities attributed to it that it never had. For years the Stanford-Binet test was common in schools, and individual lives hinged on its outcome. "Scientific" data derived from such testing was cited as support for the restrictive immigration quota of 1924, which clearly discriminated against southern Europeans, a group Terman considered to be the "least prolific of gifted children/' The test came under criticism later because it did not account for developmental and environmental factors in intelligence levels, Terman himself continued to believe that "in the main, native qualities of intellect and character, rather than chance determine the social class to which a family belongs."

Sources:

N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, eds., The IQ Controversy (New York: Pantheon, 1976);

May V. Seagoe, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos, Calif.: W. P. Kaufmann, 1975);

Evelyn Sharp, The IQ Cult (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972).