Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who believed that the most appropriate way to assess intelligence was to measure the ability of a person to preform cognitive tasks, such as figuring out the meaning of words. Binet, along with and his collaborator Theodore Simon created the first standardized intelligence test of the world, which is called the Binet-Simon intelligence Scale.

This test contained items that were organized in an increasing difficulty’s order. Such items measured common knowledge, vocabulary, and memory among others. Mental age is defined as a measure, which estimates the intellectual progress of a child by comparing the score of the child on an intelligence score to the average children’s score that are of the same age.

Thus, Binet-Simon scale produced results that were not in terms of an IQ score but in terms of mental age.

Examples of text:

Here is the text with the gaps. The words to be suppressed are in italics.

—The weather is clear, the sky is (1) blue.

—The sun has quickly dried the linen which the women have spread on the line. The cloth, white as snow, dazzles the (2) eyes.

—The women gather up the large sheets which are as stiff as though they had been (3) starched.

—They shake them and hold them by the four (4) corners.

—Then they snap the sheets with a (5) noise.

—Meanwhile the housewife irons the fine linen. She takes the irons one after the other and places them on the (6) stove.

—Little Mary who is dressing her doll would like to do some (7) ironing, but she has not had permission to touch the (8) irons

References

Binet, Alfred. 1905 [1916]. ‘New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals.’ in The Development of Intelligence In Children, edited by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. New York. pp.64, 37, 39, 40, 42–3.