Lewis Terman’s Early Intelligence Tests

How can you find Lewis Terman’s early intelligence tests? Lewis Terman was an educational psychologist at Stanford university who developed an intelligence test (later known as the Stanford-Binet IQ test), which he described in his 1916 book. Does Trinity library own this book or is the full-text version freely available online? Describe your search strategy, as well as a few sample questions from the original test, and cite your source.

Search Process:

As suggested on the web post for the source post activity, I decided to make an appointment with one of the librarians. During my appointment with the librarian, she showed me how to use the online catalog to see if the book is located in Trinity’s library. 

I decided to search the catalog by the author’s name (last name first) to see what results would display. I saw two results on the webpage that displayed his name. I decided to click on the second result that had 7 titles on record.  As I scrolled down the page, the last result titled “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” that was published in 1916. This book is available for checkout in Trinity’s library, and it can be found in the main collection. 

Terman’s book is also available in full-text online for free through Google Books. To find this text, I used the advanced search feature and typed in his last name (Terman) and the publication year (1916) of the book. Terman’s book appeared as the second entry on the results page. When I clicked on the link I was directed to the page that has the full copy of the book. One nice thing about the online text is the ability for readers to use the search box feature to search within the text.

Below is an example of one of the tests in Terman’s book:

Final Reflections:

I would like to give a special thanks to Katy Hart the Arts and Humanities librarian for assisting me with this search. I was not aware of Google Books prior to this activity, and I feel that it can be very useful for me ind the future. This activity reminded how useful the library actually is, and I plan to use its resources more frequently.

Sources:

Terman, Lewis Madison. 1916. 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. Houghton Mifflin Company.