Biography of Alfred Binet

Intelligence on a scale

8 July 1857 18 October 1911 Alfred Binet (born Alfredo Binetti) started the day 8 July 1857 in Nice, the city which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Initially his interests are oriented to the study of law, however they soon will choose the road of biology and medicine, specializing in educational psychology. French psychologist in 1905 was the first to publish an intelligence test, called "gauge Binet-Simon", which will provide the basis for today's test for the measurement of IQ. In 1895 he founded the ' Anneé Psychologique, "first French review of psychology. In 1904, the French Ministry of education appoints a Commission because studies methods for the education of children of Paris that had a lower than normal intellectual development: it was thought that if it was possible to accommodate children in special schools that were unable to follow the normal course of study, these could achieve better results. The Commission was also part of Alfred Binet. The first problem to be solved was that of identifying the subjects mentally more limited: Binet spends hours with children, watching them and subjecting them to various questions. Then processes the first metric scale composed of a series of thirty issues (or test), that tried to provide an assessment of certain aspects of intelligence, such as comprehension, the ability to logical reasoning and judgment. The problems posed by Binet were chosen so that the reference to school concepts were kept to a minimum. One of the fundamental concepts that Alfred Binet introduces is to mental age. The paradigm for assessing the results of the test is as follows: every child has an intelligence corresponding to three years if he can solve half of the tests resolved normally by children of that age; Intelligence corresponds to four years if your child exceeds at least half the tests prepared for an age of four, and so on. As a measure of mental retardation, Binet uses the simple difference between the child's mental age and chronological age. This system, however, it is not practical, because it does not provide clearly the extent of the delay. A delay of 2 years in an age of 5 years, indicates a very serious intellectual limit, while the same delay counted, for example, a 14-year-old boy, was a disadvantage slighter. Between 1908 and 1911 Alfred Binet and Theodore de Simon, will release other versions of their intelligence scale. In 1916 Lewis Terman of Stanford University, u.s., will implement a further refinement of the Binet-Simon scale, incorporating the idea of the German psychologist William Stern which said that intelligence can be measured as intelligence quotient (I.q.). Terman's test, also called "Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale" evolve into what is now the modern intelligence test. In 1894 Alfred Binet had led one of the first psychological studies about the game of chess, by analyzing the cognitive skills of the best players. Binet assumed initially that the skill in chess depends on the phenomenological qualities of Visual memory, but after studying the results of its analysis concludes that the memory is only part of the cognitive chain involved in the process of the game. A phase of the test was that players were blindfolded so they had to play from memory. Binet is that only the masters are able to play effectively without seeing the Board, while for lovers or for mid-level players this was a huge difficulty.

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