![]() ![]() For example, the distance was about 30 times greater on the small of the back than on the tip of the index finger. Previous research had shown that this distance varied from one part of the body to another. In particular, his interest was drawn to experiments on the two-point threshold, the smallest distance at which touching the skin at two different points at once is felt as two sensations rather than just one. There, he started browsing through books on psychology. False starts and lessons learnedĭiscouraged and directionless, Binet began spending time in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a great library in Paris. Binet suffered an emotional breakdown and dropped out of medical school. There was a strong medical tradition in his family his father and both of his grandfathers had been physicians. Next came a brief stint studying medicine. He first earned a law license in 1878 however, he seems to have almost immediately concluded that practicing law was not for him. Upon graduating, he had trouble deciding what career path he wanted to pursue. Once Binet turned 15, his mother took him to Paris so that he could attend a renowned school, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. This paid off later, when he was able to read the English and American psychological literature. He also spent some summers at a boardinghouse in England, where he undoubtedly improved his fluency in English. Until age 15, Binet attended school in Nice. His wealthy parents separated when he was young, leaving his mother, Moïna Binet, with most of the responsibility for raising him. He was the only child of a father who was a physician and a mother who dabbled in art. The early yearsīinet was born on July 8, 1857, in Nice, France. Yet it also gave him free rein to nurture his own tremendous curiosity and creativity. This kept him from building alliances with other professors and from training many students to follow in his footsteps. Self-taught in psychology, he never held a position as a university professor. Both of these results can be traced, at least in part, to the independence that marked Binet's career. On the other hand, his innovative ideas about child development and memory had a much more limited impact. On one hand, Binet's intelligence test became one of the most influential tests in the history of psychology. In a 1930 essay, Lewis Terman, the American psychologist who developed the Stanford-Binet, described his great predecessor this way: "My favorite of all psychologists is Binet not because of his intelligence test, which was only a by-product of his life work, but because of his originality, insight, and openmindedness, and because of the rare charm of personality that shines through all his writings." BIOGRAPHYīinet's life is notable for both its successes and its failures. It was so useful for predicting school performance that a variation, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, is still in use today. Nevertheless, Binet is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking intelligence test. The breadth of his interests led him to study a wide spectrum of the population, including schoolchildren, experts at chess and mental arithmetic, authors, mentally retarded individuals, and his own two daughters. His wide-ranging interests included sensitivity to touch, mental associations, hypnosis, child development, personality, memory, eyewitness testimony, and creativity, to name just a few. Although his work was cut short when he died at age 54, he still managed to author almost 300 published books, articles, and reviews. Yet intelligence testing was only one small part of Binet's highly productive career. In the process, they developed a revolutionary approach to testing mental abilities. Binet and Simon set out to solve this problem. However, this raised the issue of how to identify which children would benefit from special programs. For the first time, mentally "subnormal" children-those who today might be called mentally retarded or developmentally disabled-were to be provided with special classes, rather than simply ignored by the schools. ![]() In the early years of the 1900s, the French government had just enacted laws requiring that all children be given a public education. Binet's original goal for the scale was relatively modest and very practical. Along with Théodore Simon, Binet developed the Binet-Simon Scale, the forerunner of modern IQ tests. SORBONNE, DOCTORATE IN NATURAL SCIENCE, 1894 BRIEF OVERVIEWĪlfred Binet is best remembered as the developer of the first useful test for measuring intelligence. ![]() FRENCH PSYCHOLOGIST, INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHER ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |