Midterms Psych Assessment

• The roots of contemporary psychological testing and assessment can be found in early twentieth-century France.
• Alfred Binet and a colleague published a test designed to help place Paris schoolchildren in appropriate classes.
• Within a decade an English-language version of Binet’s test was prepared for use in schools in the United States.
• World War I in 1917, the military needed a way to screen large numbers of recruits quickly for intellectual and emotional problems.
• Psychological testing provided this methodology.
• World War II, the military would depend even more on psychological tests to screen recruits for service.
• Psychological testing is the process of measuring psychology-related variables by means of devices or procedures designed to obtain a sample of behavior.
• The objective of psychological testing is to obtain some gauge, usually numerical in nature, with regard to an ability or attribute.
• Testing may be individual or group in nature.
• The tester is not key to the process; practically speaking, one tester may be substituted for another tester without appreciably affecting the evaluation.
• Testing typically requires technician-like skills in terms of administering and scoring a test as well as in interpreting a test result.
• Psychological assessment is the gathering and integration of psychology-related data for the purpose of making a psychological evaluation that is accomplished through the use of tools such as tests, interviews, case studies, behavioral observation, and specially designed apparatuses and measurement procedures.
• Charles Darwin argued that chance variation in species would be selected or rejected by nature according to adaptivity and survival value.
• Responses on tests are thought to predict real-world behavior.
• Karl Pearson developed the product-moment correlation technique, its roots can be traced directly to the work of Galton.
• Test and other measurement techniques have strengths and weaknesses.
• Wundt viewed individual differences as a frustrating source of error in experimentation and attempted to control all extraneous variables in an effort to reduce error to a minimum.
• Tests and testing programs first came into being in China as early as 2200 B.C.E.
• Charles Spearman is credited with originating the concept of test reliability as well as building the mathematical framework for the statistical technique of factor analysis.
• James McKeen Cattell is credited with coining the term “mental test” in 1890.
• Testing and assessment can be conducted in a fair and unbiased manner.
• Psychological traits exist as constructs, which are informed, scientific, concept developed, or constructed to describe or explain behavior.
• Wilhelm Max Wundt focused on how people were similar, not different.
• Francis Galton aspired to classify people “according to their natural gifts” and to ascertain their “deviation from an average”.
• Psychological traits and states can be quantified and measured by different developers using different item content and item weighting.
• Test-retest reliabilities over an average of three-week range from .74 to .90 across age groups for WAIS-IV.
• The average Full Scale IQ split-half reliability coefficient across age groups for WAIS-IV was .98.
• In Picture Completion, a subtest of Perceptual Reasoning, there are color cards, each showing a picture with a part missing.
• Cancelation, a subtest of Processing Speed, requires the examinee to go through a list of colored shapes and mark the targeted shapes.
• In Block Design, a subtest of Perceptual Reasoning, the examinee must assemble up to nine blocks to match the designs on a set of cards.
• The task in Block Design involves visual-motor coordination and analytic synthesizing ability.
• A combination of numbers and letters is read, and the examinee must first recall the numbers in ascending order and then the letters in alphabetical order.
• Matrix Reasoning, a subtest of Perceptual Reasoning, consists of items that ask the respondent to indicate whether a symbol appears in the array that is present.
• The examinee in Picture Completion must identify the missing part, which requires concentration and the ability to note details and incongruities.
• Coding, a task in Processing Speed, requires the examinee to fill in the appropriate blanks under a long series of numbers, using a key.
• The objective of psychological assessment is to answer a referral question, solve a problem, or arrive at a decision through the use of tools of evaluation.
• Standards of evaluation vary between individualist cultures, which typically associate with the dominant culture in countries such as the United States and Great Britain, and collectivist cultures, typically associated with the dominant culture in many countries throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa.
• In vocational assessment, test users are sensitive to legal and ethical mandates concerning the use of tests with regard to hiring, firing, and related decision making.
• Affirmative action in assessment can be implemented by altering test-scoring procedures according to set guidelines.
• Culture and language play a significant role in assessment, as the examiner and the examinee must speak the same language.