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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.

For more information on Lewis Madison Terman, visit Britannica.com.

(tûr'mən) , 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).

(1877–1956)

Lewis M. Terman was a psychologist who developed some of the earliest and most successful measures of individual differences. He was raised on an Indiana farm and, after an early career as a schoolteacher and high school principal, received his doctorate in psychology from Clark University in 1905. After four years of teaching pedagogy at the Los Angeles State Normal School, he joined the education faculty at Stanford University in 1910. In 1922 he became head of Stanford's Psychology Department, a position he held until his retirement in 1942.

At Stanford, Terman followed up his doctoral research on mental testing by working on a revision of Alfred Binet's 1905 scale of intelligence. Collaborating with graduate students, Terman's revision was published in 1916 as the "Stanford-Binet." An innovative feature of the Stanford-Binet was the inclusion of the "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ, an index that had not been previously used in mental tests. Although there were several competitive versions, Terman's revision of the Binet test utilized the largest standardized sample and, by the 1920s, became the most widely used individually administered intelligence scale.

The success of the Stanford-Binet brought Terman professional acclaim. In 1917 he played a key role in the development of intelligence tests for the army. These group-administered tests were largely based on the Stanford-Binet. Such tests enabled large numbers of individuals to be tested at one time and, after the war, Terman endeavored to utilize this efficient form of test administration in the schools. In collaboration with a committee of psychologists who had worked on the army tests, he developed the "National Intelligence Tests" for grades three to eight, which were ready for use in 1920. Throughout the 1920s he played a leading role in establishing the widespread use of various group intelligence tests in schools so that students could be classified into homogeneous ability groups, in what became termed a tracking system. This educational practice became well established in American schools by the 1930s. Terman was also a leader in the development of group achievement tests, which assessed school learning. He collaborated on the construction of the Stanford Achievement Test, the first test battery of its kind.

Terman viewed the widespread adoption of tests in the schools as a reflection of how testing could be of use to American society. It was to be the major means of achieving his vision of a meritocracy; a social order based on ranked levels of native ability. Consistent with the views of other leaders of the American mental testing movement, Terman believed that mental abilities were primarily a product of heredity. The highest purpose that testing could serve was the identification of intellectually gifted children - the potential leaders of society.

To achieve his goals, Terman launched a longitudinal study of gifted children in 1921, the first longitudinal study in psychology to use a large sample. Canvasing elementary and secondary schools in California, Terman and his research team came up with a sample of close to 1500 children with IQ scores of at least 135. In an attempt to dispel the popular notion that gifted children were underdeveloped in nonintellectual areas, Terman included measures of personality, character, and interests. Compared with a control group of California schoolchildren, Terman reported that gifted children excelled in measures of academic achievement. The profiles of gifted children also revealed that they were emotionally as well as intellectually mature. This sample was followed as the participants moved through adolescence, adulthood, and the retirement years. The study of the gifted over the lifespan demonstrated that they had achieved career success well above the average of college graduates and attained a high degree of personal satisfaction.

As a consequence of his research with the gifted, Terman devoted the latter part of his career to assessing nonintellectual personality traits. This work centered on the measurement of gender identification, which was viewed as a composite of motivational and emotional traits that differentiated the sexes. In 1936, with his research associate Catharine Cox Miles, he produced the first questionnaire measure of masculinity - femininity. The test was standardized on a sample, primarily made up of high school juniors and college sophomores. In essence, the test reflected the gender norms of the 1930s, though Terman was insensitive to the cultural and historical limits of his measure. He chose to emphasize the need to raise and educate girls and boys so that they would conform to the existing gender norms that fostered a clear distinction between the sexes.

He extended his interest in gender differences to the study of marital adjustment. He conducted a large-scale survey of several thousand married and divorced couples. In his study, he stressed that the key to marital happiness was the extent to which each spouse accepted the other's needs and feelings, and did not fight to get their own way. Happily married women were therefore characterized as being cooperative and content with their subordinate status. Terman's conventional views on gender thus carried over from his masculinity - femininity study to his marital research.

Terman's seminal contributions to the development of testing and the study of the intellectually gifted ensure his position as one of the pioneers of American psychology. Like many other psychologists of his time, however, he was insensitive to the cultural bias inherent in psychological testing, and did not anticipate the harmful effects that testing could have on those who were not in the mainstream of American society, especially poor and racial minority children. The changing social context of the 1960s therefore brought about a more critical evaluation of Terman's accomplishments in the testing field.

Bibliography

Boring, Edwin G. 1959. "Lewis Madison Terman: 1877 - 1956." Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 33:414 - 440.

Chapman, Paul Davis. 1988. Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890 - 1930. New York: New York University Press.

Minton, Henry L. 1988. Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing. New York: New York University Press.

Seagoe, May V. 1975. Terman and the Gifted. Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann.

Terman, Lewis M. 1916. The Measurement of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Terman, Lewis M., et al. 1925. Genetic Studies of Genius: Vol. 1, Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Terman, Lewis M., et al. 1938. Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Terman, Lewis M., and Miles, Catharine Cox. 1936. Sex and Personality: Studies in Masculinity and Femininity. New York: McGraw-Hill.

— HENRY L. MINTON

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