|
|
Article: IQ
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
IQ
IQ, or intelligence quotient, is a measure of intelligence that schools, children's homes, and other child-saving institutions have used since the 1910s to assess the intelligence of children for various diagnostic purposes. Welcomed and reviled in different social and political contexts in the twentieth century, especially in the United States, because its deployment has influenced the life chances of millions of children, the IQ and the tests that produce it had modest beginnings. French psychologist Alfred Binet devised the first test of intelligence for school children in 1908 and 1911. He understood that intellectual capacity increased as children matured; his age scale, which ...