Chapter 2

• Tests and testing programs first came into being in China


  2200 B.C.E.
• Purpose of testing in China

  Selecting who, of many applicants, would obtain government jobs
• Subjects examined in China

  • Music
  • Archery
  • Horsemanship
  • Writing
  • Arithmetic
  • Agriculture
  • Geography
  • Revenue
  • Civil law
  • Military strategy
• Emphasis during Song dynasty

  Knowledge of classical literature
• During some dynasties, testing was virtually suspended, and government positions were given to family members or friends, or simply sold
• Privileges for succeeding in imperial examinations

  • Entitled to wear special garb
  • Exemption from taxes
  • Exempt one from government sponsored interrogation by torture if the individual was suspected of committing a crime
• Greco-Roman writings also attempts to categorize people in terms of personality types
• During the Middle Ages, a question of critical importance was "Who is in league with the Devil?" and various measurement procedures were devised to address this question
• It would not be until the Renaissance that measurement in the modern sense began to emerge
• By the eighteenth century, Christian von Wolff had anticipated psychology as a science and psychological measurement as a specialty within that science
• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin was published

  1859
• Darwin's writing on individual differences kindled interest in research on heredity in his half cousin, Francis Galton
• Galton's aspiration


  To classify people "according to their natural gifts" and to ascertain their "deviation from an average"
• Assessment was also an important activity at the first experimental psychology laboratory, founded at the University of Leipzig in Germany by Wilhelm Max Wundt
• Wundt and his students tried to formulate a general description of human abilities with respect to variables such as reaction time, perception, and attention span
• Individual differences were viewed by Wundt as a frustrating source of error in experimentation, and he attempted to control all extraneous variables in an effort to reduce error to a minimum
• One of Wundt's students at Leipzig, an American named James McKeen Cattell, completed a doctoral dissertation that dealt with individual differences—specifically, individual differences in reaction time
• Inspired by his interaction with Galton, Cattell returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1888 and coined the term mental test in an 1890 publication
• In 1921, Cattell was instrumental in founding the Psychological Corporation, which named 20 of the country's leading psychologists as its directors
• Other students of Wundt at Leipzig

  • Charles Spearman
  • Victor Henri
  • Emil Kraepelin
  • E. B. Titchener
  • G. Stanley Hall
  • Lightner Witmer
• Spearman is credited with originating the concept of test reliability as well as building the mathematical framework for the statistical technique of factor analysis
• Victor Henri is the Frenchman who would collaborate with Alfred Binet on papers suggesting how mental tests could be used to measure higher mental processes
• Psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin was an early experimenter with the word association technique as a formal test
• Lightner Witmer received his Ph.D. from Leipzig and went on to succeed Cattell as director of the psychology laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Witmer has been cited as the "little-known founder of clinical psychology, and founded the journal Psychological Clinic
• Much of the nineteenth-century testing that could be described as psychological in nature involved the measurement of sensory abilities, reaction time, and the like
• Alfred Binet and Victor Henri published articles arguing for the measurement of abilities such as memory and social comprehension


  1895
• Binet and Theodore Simon published a 30-item "measuring scale of intelligence" designed to help identify mentally retarded Paris schoolchildren


  1905
• In 1939, David Wechsler, a clinical psychologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, introduced a test designed to measure adult intelligence
• Wechsler's view of intelligence


  The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment
• The Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale was subsequently revised and renamed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
• Group intelligence tests came into being in the United States in response to the military's need for an efficient method of screening the intellectual ability of World War I recruits
• By the late 1930s, approximately 4,000 different psychological tests were in print, and "clinical psychology" was synonymous with "mental testing"
• World War I had brought with it not only the need to screen the intellectual functioning of recruits but also the need to screen for recruits' general adjustment
• A government Committee on Emotional Fitness chaired by psychologist Robert S. Woodworth was assigned the task of developing a measure of adjustment and emotional stability that could be administered quickly and efficiently to groups of recruits
• To disguise the true purpose of one such test, the questionnaire was labeled as a "Personal Data Sheet"
• After the war, Woodworth developed a personality test for civilian use that was based on the Personal Data Sheet. He called it the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory
• The Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory was the first widely used self-report test of personality
• Perhaps the best known of all projective tests is the Rorschach, a series of inkblots developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach
• The use of pictures as projective stimuli was popularized in the late 1930s by Henry A. Murray, Christiana D. Morgan, and their colleagues at the Harvard Psychological Clinic
• The development of psychological measurement can be traced along two distinct threads: the academic and the applied