Henry Herbert Goddard (1866–1957) was born into a New England Quaker family and obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Haverford College. After being a high school teacher and then a principal for several years, he enrolled in the doctoral program in psychology at Clark University to pursue his interests in education and psychology. Goddard did his doctoral dissertation, which investigated the psychological factors involved in faith healing, under the supervision of G. Stanley Hall. After completing his degree in 1899, Goddard first accepted a teaching position at Pennsylvania’s State Normal School, and then in 1906 he became director of research at the New Jersey Training School in Vineland, which was established for the education and care of “feeble-minded” (Goddard’s term) children.
It was Goddard who first translated the Binet– Simon scale into English. Although initially skeptical of the scale, he found it to be very effective in classifying children in terms of their degree of retardation. Goddard then translated all of Binet and Simon’s works into English and, following Binet’s death in 1911, became the world’s leading proponent of Binet’s approach to measuring intelligence. However, although accepting Binet’s testing procedures, Goddard accepted the Galton–Cattell– Spearman (hereditarian) view of the nature of intelligence rather than Binet’s.