When the United States entered the First World War, David Wechsler was completing his master’s degree in psychology at City College of New York. Then, he joined the Army, and this circumstance brought him into contact with several pioneers in the field of intelligence theory, including Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman, Edward Thorndike and Robert Yerkes. While awaiting his induction, Wechsler volunteered to score the Army Alpha test, one of the two group intelligence tests developed by the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits. Next, he became an individual psychological examiner, and was charged with administering the Stanford-Binet to recruits who had performed poorly on the group intelligence tests. In 1918 the Army sent him to London to work with Spearman and …show more content…
After that, in 1939 he produced a battery of intelligence tests known as the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale. The original battery was geared specifically to the measurement of adult intelligence, for clinical use. The Wechsler-Bellevue test quickly became the most widely used adult intelligence test in the United States, and in 1942 Wechsler issued his first revision. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children was published in 1949 and updated in 1974. In 1955 Wechsler developed yet another adult intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), with the same structure as his earlier scale but standardized with a different population. He contributed to the revision of the WAIS in 1981, shortly before his death. The last of his intelligence tests, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, was issued in 1967 as an adaptation of the children’s scale for use with very young children. His intelligence tests continue to be updated for contemporary use (Sattler,