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Why was the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale created?

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Decoding the concept of human intelligence — intelligence test Overview of human intelligence, including a discussion of intelligence tests.

The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale was created as the American adaptation of the original French Binet-Simon intelligence test. Introduced in 1916 by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, its primary purpose was to assess children aged two and older.

The development of the Binet-Simon scale was initiated in France in 1904 by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. They were tasked by the minister of public instruction in Paris to develop tests that would ensure intellectually disabled children received an adequate education and to identify children of normal intelligence who were being misclassified. Binet rejected earlier approaches that measured trivial abilities, instead focusing on skills like judgment, comprehension, and reasoning. The Stanford-Binet test, and others like it, were designed to measure these higher mental processes.12