Goddard's Binet-Simon Translation: First American Binet adaptation

About the Goddard's Binet-Simon Translation

In 1908 Henry Goddard, director of psychological research at the Vineland Training School, traveled to Europe and learned about Binet and Simon's intelligence test. He translated the test into English and brought it back to the United States. Goddard's translation was first published in 1910 as a Training School Bulletin article and became the standard American Binet-Simon for the next six years.

Goddard used the translation extensively at Vineland, both for cognitive assessment of the residents and for landmark research studies. His most famous use was the controversial 1912 Kallikak Family study, which used Binet-Simon results to argue for the heritability of intellectual disability. The Kallikak study was later thoroughly discredited (Goddard had fabricated some of his observations), but the Binet-Simon translation itself remained sound.

Goddard's translation was eventually superseded by Lewis Terman's 1916 Stanford-Binet, which had improved norms based on American children rather than French ones. But Goddard's translation remains historically important as the first widely-used American version of the Binet-Simon, and as the instrument used in many landmark early-20th-century American psychological studies.

The 1 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Goddard, H. H. (1910). A measuring scale for intelligence. Training School Bulletin, 6(11), 146-155. Also Goddard, H. H. (1911). The Binet and Simon tests of intellectual capacity. Training School Bulletin, 8, 56-62.

Public domain. Henry H. Goddard (1866-1957) was the director of psychological research at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey from 1906 to 1918. He brought the Binet-Simon scale from France to America in 1908 and was the most influential figure in early American clinical intelligence testing.