Author Terman Lewis Madison

ty until his death. He served as chairman of the psychology department from 1922 to 1945. During World War I, Terman served in the United States military while conducting psychological tests. Terman was able to work with other applied psychologists to categorise army recruits. The recruits were given group intelligence tests which took about an hour to administer. The examiners scored the tests on a scale ranging from "A" through "E". Recruits who earned scores of "A" would be trained as officers while those who earned scores of "D" and "E" would never receive officer training. The work of psychologists during the war proved to Americans that intelligence tests could have broader utility. After the war Terman and his colleages pressed for intelligence tests to be used in schools to improve the effieciency of growing American schools. Terman's initial studies were even more troublesome. He administered English tests to Spanish-speakers and unschooled African-Americans, concluding: “High-grade or border-line deficiency… is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes… They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (The Measurement of Intelligence, 1916, p. 91-92). Terman's biased tests gave "scientific" proof that, for many Whites, justified racial discrimination, segregation, and eugenics. Unlike Binet and Simon, whose goal was to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track. He believed IQ was inherited and was the strongest predictor of one's ultimate success in life. Terman adopted William Stern's suggestion that mental age/chronological age times 100 (to get rid of the decimal) be made the intelligence quotient or IQ. (NB: Most modern IQ tests calculate the intelligence quotient differently.) In 1921, Terman initiated the Genetic Studies of Genius, a long-term study of gifted children. He found that gifted children did not fit the existing stereotypes often associated with them: they were not weak and sickly social misfits, but in fact were generally taller, in better health, better developed physically, and better adapted socially than other children. The children included in his studies were colloquially referred to as "Termites."[1] Terman later joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group founded by E.S. Gosney in 1928 which had as part of its agenda the promotion and enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California. [http://www.terman.pausd.org/ Terman Middle School] in Palo Alto, California is named after himself and his son. Lewis Terman was the father of Frederick Terman, who, as provost of Stanford University, greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments that helped catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world's first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley. Stanford University has an endowed professorship in his honor. Holders have included