Growing Pains Successful Adults, Or at Any Rate More Successful Than the P

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these children grew up to be Growing pains successful adults, or at any rate more successful than the P. E. Bryant average person, and this re sult has been taken by many Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking as establishing the validity of Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. By intelligence tests. Joel N. Shurkin. Little, Brown: 1992. Since Terman's death, Pp. 317. $22.95. other psychologists have con tinued to collect data on these DURING the first ten years of this cen remorselessly studied people, tury, Alfred Binet, a distinguished who by now are in their 80s French psychologist, devised the first and 90s. The sheer amount of successful intelligence test, which im information on Terman's chil mediately became one of psychology's dren is both daunting and im most formidable achievements and also pressive, but it does not com one of its greatest headaches. The intelli pensate for several basic flaws gence test, without doubt, is the most in the design of the project. effective and widely used instrument in The most serious of these was vented by psychol;:.gists, but it lacks a the omission of a control theoretical base. We know that it works group. Most of the Termites quite well: it will, for example, predict came, not surprisingly, from fairly accurately how well children will prosperous and well educated do at school, in the immediate future at families. So it is quite possible any rate. But we do not know even now that their better than average what intelligence tests measure, and we progress through life was de CNir1 Ca nlanl de la Tour'lIlIIren (1.8U). Thl. dlagnm Is are equally hard put to say with any termined by their family back reproduced from The Sclene. of Musical Sound by John R. coherence what intelligence is. The con grounds and not by their 10. PIerce. the revl ocIltlon of wtlidli. now published In papelilack by Fre m n. price £17.95. $19.95. (For a nwlew trast between the test's practical success Terman should have com of the llrat edition 5H NlJture 308, 791; 1984.) and its theoretical ambiguity is extremely pared his geniuses with a stark. group of children who came from much tered by the women in the project, A great deal of the test's immediate the same backgrounds but did not Shurkin says, "One would have to factor practical success was due to the work of have as high lOs. Without this compari in sexual discrimination in the working Lewis Terman, an American psycholo son we cannot be sure that the study has world to understand these figures in gist who produced the first transatlantic told us anything about the value of their context" - a suggestion that is version of Binet's test - the Stanford 10 per se. neither practicable nor even compre Binet - and then went on to devise Joel Shurkin's book is partly a popular hensible. Shurkin is sometimes plainly other tests of his own. He had no doubt account of the project and partly a illogical about the data. Terman, in one about the importance of his work. biographical picture of Terman himself. of his later reports, had divided the "There is nothing", he argued "about an The author was given access to the Termites into three subgroups: the A's individual as important as his 10 except detailed records on some of the people who had done particularly well in life, possibly his morals." Naturally, Terman in the study, and he has obviously wres the C's who had had the least success, wanted to establish the value of what he tled with the voluminous reports that and the B's who were somewhere in was doing, and in 1921 he began a have been written about the project. His between. This division prompts one of research project whose main aim was to book is at its strongest when it deals with Shurkin's oddest statements: "The prop show that people's lives are deeply the journalistic fringes of the topic. He ortion of Jews in the A group was affected by their intelligence levels as has some quite interesting things to say, double the proportion of Jews who were measured by his and by other intelli for example, about the wide fame C's despite the fact that only 10 per cent gence tests. He and his colleagues set achieved by the project, which has often of the Terman kids [that is, the total out to identify all the children in the been featured in newspapers and in sample] were Jewish." This howler looks Californian school system whose 10 popular journals. He also writes enter particularly odd in a book about highly scores were in the top one per cent of tainingly about the effects of being a intelligent people. the population. Having selected 1,470 Termite. It seems that many of them Shurkin is also prone to making rather such children, the researchers then came to rely heavily on Terman's advice wild and unsubstantiated claims, such as: gathered a large amount of detailed and support (Terman got one of them "He [Terman] eventually had to con information about their families and into Stanford University, for example), front the connubiality of madness and homes, their history, their health and to the extent that Terman's influence on genius." If Shurkin means by this that their performance at school. the lives of his subjects may have had a Terman or anyone else has shown a But the main feature of the study was considerable effect on his results. connection between superior talents and that it was longitudinal. Terman wanted The book is weak, though, on the instability he is wrong, and in fact to find out what would happen in adult conceptual and scientific issues. Terman made the opposite claim. hood to these able children, whom he Although Shurkin briefly mentions the A great deal has already been written insisted, rather generously as it turned lack of a control group, he is never clear about Terman's fascinating, but sadly out, on calling "geniuses". He kept in about the controls that are needed. Nor flawed, study. This new book is not a touch with his group of "Termites", as does he write well about the purpose of valuable addition to the genre. 0 they were soon called, and continued to the project, which was to show the gather information about them, both by power and the value of intelligence tests. P. E. Bryant is in the Department of correspondence and by systematic re The book is particularly weak when he Experimental Psychology, University of search until his death nearly 40 years deals with quantitative evidence. In dis Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford later. By and large, he showed that cussing the particular difficulties encoun- OX13UD, UK.