James McKeen Cattell initiated the first systematic program of psychological testing in the new experimental psychology and coined the term “mental test.” Using a series of perceptual and cognitive tasks, he tested Columbia University’s students in varied tasks such as the speed with which a person could identify colors, accuracy in saying when a ten-second period had elapsed, the strength of one’s hand grip, and success in recalling items from a list. These tasks were meant to assess intelligence and were based on the tenets of evolutionary theory at the time. The idea was that more evolutionarily developed people would show better sensory, motor, and cognitive abilities because all knowledge came through the senses so such people should have superior sensory and perceptual abilities. As it turned out, such tasks did not success-fully differentiate “smart” from “not-so-smart” people. Nonetheless, psychologists continued their quest to measure intelligence, although they abandoned Cattell’s approach.
Alfred Binet was the first psychologist to achieve success in the development of mental tests. His aim was to identify students at risk who could be given remedial instruction. American psychologists translated Binet’s French test into English, reconceptualizing it as a measure of an unchanging intellectual characteristic. Theta Holmes Wolf’s Alfred Binet characterizes Binet’s work and identifies differences between his purposes and those of subsequent American psychologists.
Lewis Terman was responsible in large part for the nature of intelligence testing in the United States as he revised Binet’s test, renaming it the Stanford-Binet and authoring the book The Measurement of Intelligence. Similar to many other psychologists, Terman was a eugenicist who believed that intelligence was fixed and governed by heredity. Henry L. Minton documents Terman’s work in Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing, discussing the varied aspects of Terman’s life and ideas. Editor Michael Sokal and contributors present a broader depiction in the collection Psychological Testing and American Society: 1890–1930, showing how the psychologists involved in the testing movement were products of their times.
One historical application of intelligence testing important to both issues of assessment and the eugenics movement was the testing of immigrants at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century. Leila Zenderland captures the work and ideas of Henry Goddard in her volume Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. Further, a recent biography by John T. E. Richardson, Howard Andrew Knox: Pioneer of Intelligence Testing at Ellis Island, describes how testing unfolded at Ellis Island and details some historical issues related to the public’s concern that the intelligence of the American populace was endangered by the mentally unfit.
Psychologists today regard intelligence testing as a worthwhile endeavor; such tests constitute the single largest class of assessment instruments. Following the work of psychologists like Brigham, Goddard, and Terman on intelligence, David Wechsler developed useful intelligence tests for children and for adults. Revised versions are widely used by professionals today.
Nonetheless, such tests have regularly been criticized for their narrow applicability, as Keith E. Stanovich notes in What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. Howard Gardner expands the notion of intelligence by positing the existence of multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The idea has gained popularity among the general population, but many psychologists question Gardner’s theory due to lack of empirical evi-dence. As such, psychologists are still wrestling with some of the same issues that have reverberated across the past cen-tury. For a good overview, Alan S. Kaufman has produced a basic history of the complex area of intelligence testing in IQ Testing 101.
Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1913 by 
