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

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.

The 2 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

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.