Case Study Lewis Terman

1. According to a longitudinal study by Lewis Terman, a high IQ does have some degree of impact on predicting success in life (for example, children who achieved genius scores as children made $33,000 per year when an average income at the time was just $5,000 per year), however, it by no means guarantees it. When Terman looked at the adult success of the children that were scored as geniuses as children, he took the 100 most successful and the 100 least successful and put them into two groups. Group A were very successful as adults and group C were not very successful as a adults (for example more likely to be alcoholics and divorced). He looked at what made group A so much more successful than group C and he noticed the group A had traits such as “prudence and forethought, will power, perseverance, and the desire to excel” and “more goal oriented, had greater perseverance, and had greater self-confidence,” many traits today that are would be described with the buzzword “grit.” The studied demonstrated that while IQ does have some effect on feature success, there are other traits that have a greater impact.

The official rationale was that the children were intellectually and/or developmentally disabled (although many were not) and needed to be institutionalized so that they could not “reproduce.” This was part of the “eugenics” movement that took place in the part of the first part of the twentieth century with the goals to prevent people who believed to be “inferior” from being allowed to reproduce in an attempt to “purify” the genetic pool and prevent further generations of people from having disabilities. The children that were kept at Fernald had very few, in any, real educational goals and were instead forced to work if they were able to; as one patient described that they “took” his education (along with his childhood) from