Part 3 (1/2)

So:--

”Why do you love your parents?” ”If it takes three persons seven hours to do a piece of work, would it take seven persons any longer?” ”Which would you rather have, a fourth of a pie, or a half of a half?” ”Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” ”If you had twenty cents ould you do with it?”

A great eneral appearance of the face and eyes An ”active” or ”passive” expression of the eyes was looked upon as especially significant One teacher thought that a rade of intelligence

If the eyes are penetrating, reflective, or show curiosity, the child ent; if they are heavy and expressionless, he must be dull The mobility of countenance came in for frequent mention, also the shape of the head

No one will deny that intelligence displays itself to a greater or less extent in the features; but how, asks Binet, are we going to _standardize_ a ”glance of the eye” or an ”expression of curiosity” so that it will serve as an exact ence?

The fact is, the more one sees of feeble-minded children, the less reliance one coence Soeneral appearance of low-grade imbeciles On the other hand, not a feho are distinctly feeble-minded are pretty and attractive With many such children a ready smile takes the place of comprehension If the smile is rather sweet and sympathetic, as is often the case, the observer is alards the shape of the head, peculiar conforo denificance

In reply to the second question, some teachers stated that they never made a mistake, while others admitted failure in one case out of three

Still others said, ”Once in ten years,” ”once in twenty years,” ”once in a thousand times,” etc

As Binet re

In the first place, the teacher as a rule loses sight of the pupil when he has passed fro out whether his later success belies her judgo undiscovered for the simple reason that there is no opportunity to check theh that an errorIf I say that a h to apply astick and prove the correctness or incorrectness of my assertion But if I say simply that the man is ”rather tall,” or ”very tall,” the error must be very extreme before we can expose it, particularly since the estimate can itself be checked up only by observation and not by controlled experiment

The teachers' answers seem to justify three conclusions:--

1 Teachers do not have a very definite idea of what constitutes intelligence They tend to confuse it variously with capacity for , ability to master arithmetic, etc On the whole, their standard is too academic They fail to appreciate the one-sidedness of the school's dee discussing this tendency, Binet characterizes the child in a class as _denature_, a French hich we h rather too literally) as ”denatured” Too often this ”denatured” child of the classroo intelligence teachers are too easily deceived by a sprightly attitude, a sylance of the eye, or a chance ”buh a few teachers seem to realize the many possibilities of error, the majority show rather undue confidence in the accuracy of their judgment

BINET'S EXPERIMENT ON HOW TEACHERS TEST INTELLIGENCE[9] Finally, Binet had three teachers coence of children whom they had never seen before Each spent an afternoon in the laboratory and examined five pupils In each case the teacher was left free to arrive at a conclusion in her oay Binet, who remained in the room and took notes, recounts with playful humor how the teachers were unavoidably coh their atteist's point of view, aly clumsy

[9] See p 182 _ff_ of reference 2 at end of this book

One teacher, for example, questioned the children about so what their purpose was and how they worked Another showed the children soht with her for the purpose, and asked questions about thearret differs fro a factory it was best to have the walls thick or thin As King Edward had just died, another teacher questioned the children about the details of this event, in order to find out whether they were in the habit of reading the newspapers, or understood the things they heard others read

Other questions related to the nahborhood, the road one should take to reach a certain point in the vicinity, etc

Binet notes that many of the questions were special, and were only applicable with the children of this particular school

Thethe responses was also at fault The teachers did not adhere consistently to any definite for a particular test to the different children Instead, the questions were materially altered from time to time One teacher scored the identical response differently for two children, giving one child ed his intelligence to be superior In several cases the examination was needlessly delayed in order to instruct the child in what he did not know

The examination ended, quite properly for a teacher's examination, with questions about history, literature, the metric system, etc, and with the recitation of a fable

A co the estimates of the three teachers When questioned about the standard that had been taken in arriving at their conclusions, one teacher said she had taken the answers of the first pupil as a point of departure, and that she had judged the other pupils by this one Another judged all the children by a child of her acquaintance whoent

This was, of course, an unsafe method, because no one could say how the child taken as an ideal would have responded to the tests used with the five children

In su the result of his little experiment, Binet points out that the teachers employed, as if by instinct, the veryit, however, they made numerous errors

Their questions were often needlessly long Several were ”dilemma questions,” that is, answerable by _yes_ or _no_ In such cases chance alone will cause fifty per cent of the answers to be correct Soe Others were entirely special, usable only with the children of this particular school on this particular day Not all of the questions were put in the saiven response did not always receive the same score

When the children responded incorrectly or incoiven help, but not always to the same extent In other words, says Binet, it was evident that ”the teachers employed very aardly a very excellent method”