Lewis Terman

Lewis Madison Terman (1877 to 1956) was an American psychologist and academic who became a pioneer of educational psychology in the early twentieth century at the Stanford School of Education. He is best known for revising the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which became a standard instrument for measuring intelligence, and for starting the Genetic Studies of Genius, a longitudinal study that followed children with high IQs across their lives. Terman also served as president of the American Psychological Association, and a 2002 survey ranked him the seventy-second most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. He was a prominent proponent of eugenics, belonging to the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association, and he believed in genetic racial associations with intelligence, a view now rejected and an important part of how his legacy is assessed.