Lewis Terman

Introduction

Lewis Madison Terman (January 15, 1877 – December 21, 1956) was an American educational psychologist who revised the Binet-Simon scale for American use and launched one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in the history of psychology. The test he produced, the Stanford-Binet, carried the intelligence quotient into English-speaking schools and clinics, and it remains in use in its fifth revision. In 1921 he began the Genetic Studies of Genius, a decades-long follow-up of more than 1,500 high-scoring California children who became known informally as the Termites. Terman was also an influential institution builder: he chaired the Stanford psychology department from 1922 to 1942 and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1923. His reputation has been re-examined sharply in recent decades because he was an open advocate of eugenics, held racial hereditarian views that he published in his own test manuals, and used his scientific authority to argue for classifying and segregating children by measured ability.

Early Life and Education

Terman was born on a farm in Johnson County, Indiana, the twelfth of fourteen children of James William Terman and Martha Cutsinger Terman. Few of his rural contemporaries continued school past the eighth grade; Terman was a voracious reader who borrowed money from his family to continue his own schooling. He enrolled at Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, where he took a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Pedagogy in 1894 and a Bachelor of Arts in 1898, then taught in one-room schoolhouses to repay what he owed.

He continued at Indiana University Bloomington, earning a second bachelor's degree and a master's degree in 1903. In 1905 he completed a doctorate at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall. His dissertation, titled Genius and Stupidity, applied the mental-test battery developed by James McKeen Cattell to seven boys judged bright and seven judged stupid. It established the two themes that occupied the rest of his working life: individual differences in measured ability, and the belief that those differences could be captured by a number.

Terman suffered recurrent tuberculosis, which pushed him toward a warm, dry climate. He worked as a school principal in San Bernardino, California, in 1905 and joined the Los Angeles Normal School as a professor in 1907.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1910 Terman accepted an invitation from Ellwood Patterson Cubberley to join Stanford University as a professor of educational psychology, and he stayed for the rest of his life. Within a few years he was turning the French Binet-Simon scale into an American instrument. He chaired the Stanford psychology department from 1922 until 1942, when he formally retired while continuing his research.

During the First World War Terman worked on psychological testing for the United States Army. Along with other applied psychologists he helped produce the Army Alpha, a text-based group test, and the Army Beta, a picture-based version for non-readers and non-English speakers. Roughly 1.7 million recruits were examined, and the results were graded from A to E, with A candidates routed toward officer training and D and E candidates excluded from it. Terman read the exercise as proof that mental testing could be administered cheaply at scale, and after the war he pressed for the same instruments to be used in schools.

At Stanford he built a research program around measurement. He produced the Stanford Achievement Test, the National Intelligence Test, and the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability, and he trained a generation of researchers who carried the testing movement into American education.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale

Terman's 1916 The Measurement of Intelligence presented a restandardized, extended version of the test created by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon. Three changes mattered most. First, he renormed the items on a large American sample and extended the range upward and downward. Second, he adopted William Stern's proposal that mental age be divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100, which popularized the term intelligence quotient. Third, he attached a classification vocabulary to the scores, reserving "near genius or genius" for scores at or above 140.

The intent differed from Binet's. Binet had built his scale to find children who needed help; Terman proposed using scores to sort children into different educational and occupational tracks on the assumption that adult roles should follow from measured childhood ability.

Genetic Studies of Genius

In 1921, funded in part by the Commonwealth Fund, Terman began a longitudinal study of gifted children. Teachers nominated their brightest pupils, nominees sat a group test, and the strongest were then given an individual Stanford-Binet by Terman's assistants, among them Florence Goodenough and Catharine Cox. The cohort settled at 1,528 children, 856 boys and 672 girls, nearly all of them scoring at roughly 135 or above and drawn almost entirely from white, middle- and upper-class California families.

The first volume reported that the children were not the sickly, eccentric misfits of folklore. They were taller and healthier than average, socially competent, and academically successful, and they retained their high scores on retesting. Later follow-ups found that more than half finished college at a time when about 8 percent of the general population did, and that they entered professional and managerial occupations at high rates.

The psychology of talent and its limits

Terman also reported the finding that complicates his own hereditary assumptions. By the fourth volume he and Melita Oden concluded that intellect and achievement were "far from perfectly correlated"; many subjects lived ordinary lives as clerks, typists, seamen and police officers, and the men rated most successful differed from the least successful less in childhood IQ than in self-confidence, perseverance and goal orientation.

Major Publications

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 Intelligence of School Children (1919)
Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume I: Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children (1925)
Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume III: The Promise of Youth (1930, with Barbara Stoddard Burks and Dortha Williams Jensen)
Measuring Intelligence (1937, with Maud A. Merrill)
Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume IV: The Gifted Child Grows Up (1947, with Melita H. Oden)
Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume V: The Gifted Group at Mid-Life (1959, with Melita H. Oden)

Impact and Legacy

Terman made intelligence testing routine in American schools and made the phrase "IQ" part of ordinary language. Gifted education as a field, the practice of above-level testing, and the entire apparatus of standardized achievement measurement trace back in part to his work, and his longitudinal design became the model for later projects such as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A 2002 survey in Review of General Psychology ranked him the 72nd most cited psychologist of the twentieth century, tied with his own mentor Hall.

The same legacy carries a substantial body of criticism. The gifted study has been attacked as ungeneralizable: the sample was self-selected through teacher nomination, was 95 to 99 percent white and largely middle-class, and included almost no variation in the very variable under examination, so it could describe differences among high scorers but not differences between them and everyone else. Terman also intervened in his subjects' lives, writing recommendations for jobs and college and using his standing at Stanford to help some of them gain admission, which contaminates the outcome data the study was meant to explain. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin argued in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences that a random sample of children from comparable family backgrounds would have done about as well.

The most cited illustration of the study's limits is the one Terman did not live to answer. The Termites produced no Nobel laureates, while two California boys screened during selection and rejected for insufficient scores later won the prize in physics: William Shockley in 1956 and Luis Alvarez in 1968. Defenders, including Russell Warne and colleagues writing in Intelligence in 2020, simulated Terman's procedure and estimated that it had a 53 to 83 percent chance of catching neither laureate purely because of base rates, arguing that the miss indicts the prediction of rare events rather than the test itself. Both readings are compatible: childhood IQ predicted the ordinary run of adult outcomes well and was nearly useless for identifying transformative achievement.

Terman's involvement in eugenics is documented rather than alleged. He was listed among the active members of the Eugenics Research Association in 1916, belonged to the American Eugenics Society, and joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena organization founded by E. S. Gosney in 1928 whose agenda included promoting and enforcing California's compulsory sterilization law. In The Measurement of Intelligence he wrote that borderline deficiency was "very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes," that their "dullness seems to be racial," that such children "should be segregated into separate classes," and that "from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding." In the first volume of the gifted study he offered a median IQ of 80 for Italian, Portuguese and Mexican school children in California cities. These passages gave a scientific warrant to segregation, restrictive immigration and sterilization policy.

Responses divide. Supporters note that Terman included girls in his sample when women had few career options, that he softened his hereditarian claims later in life and granted more weight to schooling, motivation and environment, and that his racial views were widespread among American psychologists of the period. Critics reply that the "man of his time" defense is exculpatory, that his contemporaries included psychologists who rejected these conclusions, and that he never publicly renounced the positions he had published. Terman died in Palo Alto on December 21, 1956, with the fifth volume of his study unfinished; Melita Oden completed it, and Robert Richardson Sears, himself a subject of the study, later directed the follow-ups that continue to the present. His son, Frederick Terman, became provost of Stanford and is credited with fostering the growth of Silicon Valley.

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References

Terman, L. M. (1916). The Measurement of Intelligence. Houghton Mifflin.