Intelligence of School Children

The book that brought intelligence testing to American education. Lewis Terman, who adapted the Binet scale into the Stanford-Binet test, presents his research measuring the intellectual capacities of thousands of California schoolchildren. He argues that standardized IQ tests can identify gifted students, those needing remediation, and children whose mental abilities differ radically from their chronological peers. The book proposes educational tracking based on measured ability and makes the case that schools must account for these vast individual differences. Terman's work transformed how Americans understood student potential and launched the modern field of educational psychology. It also represents a foundational text in the history of intelligence testing, one whose legacy includes both valuable insights and deeply troubling connections to eugenics and social control movements of the 20th century.