Describe factors that led to the development of the first intelligence tests, and explain Binet's and Simon's contribution to the intelligence testing movement

What will be an ideal response?

The social and educational climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the development of the first intelligence tests. With the beginning of universal public education in Europe and North America—allowing all children, not just society's privileged, to enroll in school—educators sought methods to identify students who were unable to benefit from regular classroom instruction.
The first successful intelligence test, constructed by French psychologist Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon in 1905, responded to this need. The French Ministry of Instruction asked Binet to devise an objective method for assigning pupils to special classes—one based on mental ability, not classroom disruptiveness. Binet believed that test items should tap complex mental activities involved in intelligent behavior, such as memory and reasoning. Consequently, Binet and Simon devised a test of general ability that included a variety of verbal and nonverbal items, each requiring thought and judgment. Their test was also the first to associate items of increasing difficulty with chronological age. This enabled Binet and Simon to estimate how much a child was behind or ahead of his or her agemates in intellectual development.
The Binet test was so successful in predicting school performance that it became the basis for new intelligence tests. The English version has been known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.