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Stanford-Binet 1937 (Terman-Merrill Revision): Terman-Merrill Stanford-Binet revision

The 1937 revision of the Stanford-Binet, the dominant US individual intelligence test from 1916 through the late 1950s. Lewis Terman collaborated with Maud Merrill to substantially revise his 1916 original: improved item difficulty calibration, two parallel forms (L and M), expanded age range, and updated norms based on 3,184 American children. The Terman-Merrill revision was the standard US individual IQ test for two decades.

Read About the Test

About the Stanford-Binet 1937 (Terman-Merrill Revision)

By the mid-1930s the 1916 Stanford-Binet had been the dominant US individual intelligence test for 20 years, but its limitations had become apparent. The original norms were based on California schoolchildren of 1916; demographic and cultural changes had made these obsolete. The original difficulty calibration had several problems at specific age levels. And there was no parallel form available for retest administration.

Lewis Terman recruited his collaborator Maud Merrill to lead a thorough revision. The 1937 Stanford-Binet had three major improvements: (1) much better difficulty calibration, with items tested empirically and ordered precisely by p-value; (2) two parallel forms (L and M), allowing retest administration without practice effects; (3) updated norms based on 3,184 American children stratified to be representative of the US population, the largest standardization sample in cognitive testing history at that time.

The 1937 Stanford-Binet was the dominant US individual intelligence test from 1937 through the late 1950s. It was eventually displaced by the Wechsler scales (which had a verbal-performance split that the Stanford-Binet lacked), but Terman-Merrill remained the secondary instrument for child cognitive assessment well into the 1980s. The 1960 revision (Form L-M, Terman & Merrill again) and 1973 revision (Thorndike, Hagen & Sattler) continued the same lineage. The current Stanford-Binet 5 (2003) is a substantially different instrument but maintains the historical connection.

Copyright note: The 1937 Stanford-Binet items are under Riverside Insights copyright. Our separate page for the 1916 Stanford-Binet has public-domain interactive items in the original Terman format.

The 2 subtests

#1
Age-graded items, Forms L and M Items spanning age levels from Year II to Adult, with each level containing several items measuring cognitive abilities appropriate to that developmental stage. Forms L and M allow alternative-form retest.
Copyrighted
#2
Standardization sample 3,184 American children stratified to be representative of the 1937 US population.
Reference

Sample Items (Illustrative)

Items are presented as verbal questions or tasks appropriate to the developmental stage of the test-taker. Responses are scored based on accuracy and appropriateness, with correct answers receiving full credit.

Sample 1 · Age-graded items, Form L
At the Year II level, the child is shown a picture of a cat and asked, 'What is this?'
Example response: The child correctly identifies the picture by saying 'cat'.
Sample 2 · Age-graded items, Form M
At the Year V level, the child is presented with a series of three pictures showing a simple story and asked to arrange them in the correct order.
Example response: The child arranges the pictures to show a sequence of a boy picking up a ball, throwing it, and then catching it.
Sample 3 · Age-graded items, Form L
At the Year X level, the child is asked to solve a simple arithmetic problem: 'If you have three apples and you give one to your friend, how many apples do you have left?'
Example response: The child answers 'two'.
Sample 4 · Age-graded items, Form M
At the Adult level, the participant is asked to interpret a proverb: 'A stitch in time saves nine.'
Example response: The participant explains that it means taking care of a problem early can prevent it from becoming bigger.
Sample 5 · Age-graded items, Form L
At the Year VII level, the child is asked to repeat a series of four digits in the same order after hearing them once: '4, 7, 2, 9'.
Example response: The child repeats the sequence correctly as '4, 7, 2, 9'.

These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.

Source

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

Lewis M. Terman & Maud A. Merrill (1937). Stanford-Binet 1937 (Terman-Merrill Revision).

The 1937 Stanford-Binet (Terman-Merrill) is under Houghton Mifflin copyright (subsequently transferred to Riverside Insights). The 1916 Stanford-Binet (Terman original) is public domain and we have a separate page for it with interactive items.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

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The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.