Word: terman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...
...Terman believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great sorting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell...
...inductees. It was the world's first mass administration of an intelligence test, and many of the standardized tests in use today can be traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT; the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its publisher; and Terman's own National Intelligence Test, originally used in tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly by asking vocabulary questions (synonyms, antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension...
...denote a society that organizes itself according to IQ-test scores. That term too has entered the language, though it doesn't have quite the market penetration that IQ does--or the disparaging overtone that Young intended in his satiric fable The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033. Terman and many other early advocates of IQ testing had in mind the creation of an American meritocracy, though the word didn't exist then. They believed IQ tests could be the means to create, for the first time ever, a society in which advantage would go to the people who deserved...
That hasn't stopped thousands of winter depressives from trying to heal themselves. Light boxes for that purpose are available for $300 to $600 without a doctor's prescription. That bothers Michael Terman, a research psychologist at Columbia University. He is worried that the boxes may be tried by patients who are suicidal or suffer from mental illness that can't be treated with light. Terman has developed a questionnaire, available at www.cet.org/cet2000 to help determine whether you should seek expert care...