PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING

AND ASSESSMENT
QUICKNOTES BY:
Kristine Confesor

PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING AND ASSESSMENT 5. Business and Military Settings

Based on: 2012 Edition book of
Kaplan and Saccuzzo Types of Tests
1. Individual tests – can be given to only one person at a time
2. Group tests – more than one person at a time by a single examiner
I. Ability Tests – measure skills in terms of speed, accuracy, or both
a. Achievement Test - previous learning
I. Principles b. Aptitude – potential for learning or acquiring specific skill
- Introduction c. Intelligence – person’s general potential to solve problems,
- Norms and Basic Statistics for Testing adapt to changing circumstances, think abstractly, and profit
- Correlation and Regression from experience.
- Reliability
- Validity II. Personality Tests – measure typical behaviour- traits, temperaments, and
- Writing and Evaluating Test Items dispositions
- Test Administration a. Structured (objective): provides a self-report statement to which
the person responds “True” or “False”, “Yes” or “No”
II. Applications b. Projective: provides an ambiguous test stimulus; response
- Interviewing Techniques requirements are unclear
- Theories of Intelligence and Binet Scales
- The Wechsler Intelligence Scales: WAIS-IV, WISC-IV, and WPPSI- HISTORICAL, CULTURAL, and LEGAL/ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
III Han Dynasty: use of test batteries (two or more tests used in conjunction)
- Other individual Tests of Ability in Education and Special Ming Dynasty: national multistage testing program involved local and regional testing
Education centers equipped with special testing booths; series of tests for public office
- Standardized Tests in Education, Civil Service, and the Military 1855: British government copied the Chinese system for employee selection and for its
- Applications in Clinical and Counseling Settings civil service
- Projective Personality Tests 1883: US government established American Civil Service Commission
- Computers and Basic Psychological Science and Testing
- Testing in Counseling Psychology  Charles Darwin higher forms of life evolved partially because of individual
- Testing in Health Psychology and Health Care differences within a species
- Testing in Industrial and Business Settings  Francis Galton: individual differences exist in human sensory and motor
functioning such as reaction time, visual acuity, and physical strength.
III. Issues  Karl Pearson: developed the product-moment correlation technique
-Test Bias  Wilhelm Max Wundt: formulated a general description of human abilities with
-Testing and the Law respect to variables such as reaction time, perception, and attention span; focused
- Ethics and Future of Psychological Testing on how people are similar
 James Mckeen Cattell : coined the term mental test based on Galton’s work on
individual differences in reaction time.
o Also instrumental in founding the Psychological Corporation
with a goal for the “advancement of psychology and the
promotion of the useful applications of psychology.
PRINCIPLES
 Charles Spearman: originating the concept of test reliability as well as building
- Introduction- the mathematical framework for the statistics of factor analysis
 Psychological test – educational test or a set of items that are designed to measure  Victor Henri: collaborated with Binet on papers suggesting how mental tests
characteristics of human beings that pertain to behaviour. could be used to measure higher mental processes
 Psychological Assessment – gathering and integration of psychology-related data  Emil Kraepelin: early experimenter with the word association technique as a
for the purpose of making a psychological evaluation that is accomplished through formal test
the use of such tools as tests, interviews, case studies, behavioural observation, and  Light Witmer: little known founder of clinical psychology and founded the
specially designed apparatuses and measurement procedures journal Psychological Clinic having its first article entitled as “Clinical
o Collaborative – assessor and assesse may work as “partners” Psychology”
from initial contract through final feedback
o Therapeutic – therapeutic self-discovery and new
understandings are encouraged throughout the entire assessment
process 20th Century
o Dynamic – interactive approach to psychological assessment  Alfred Binet and Victor Henri: 1895, published several articles which they
that usually follows a model of (1) evaluation, (2) intervention, argued for the measurement of abilities such as memory and social
(3) evaluation comprehension

 Scales – relate raw scores on test items to some defined theoretical or empirical  Binet Simon Scale – 1905, contained 30 items of increasing difficulty and was
distribution designed to identify intellectually subnormal individuals; concept of mental age
 Scoring – process of assigning such evaluative codes or statements to performance was made.
on tests, tasks, interviews, or other behaviour samples.  David Weschler, 1939: intelligence was the aggregate or global capacity of the
o Cut Score - any reference point, usually numerical, divided by individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with the
judgment and used to divide a set of data into two or more environment
classifications o Group Intelligence Test: came into being in the US in
response to the military’s need for an efficient method of
Who are the parties to a Test? screening the intellectual ability of World War I recruits
1. Test Developers and Publishers  Stanford Binet Scale – revision made by Terman on 1916
2. Test User  WWI- they army requested the assistance of Yerkes, APA president to create a
3. Testtaker committee of distinguished psychologists to develop 2 structured group tests of
4. Society at large human abilities: They Army Alpha and the Army Beta.
 Achievement Tests: provide multiple choice questions that are standardized on a
Settings large sample to produce norms against which the results of new examinees can be
1. Educational Settings compared.
a. School Ability Tests – identify children w/ special needs
b. Achievement Tests – evaluates accomplishments or the degree
of learning that has taken place
c. Diagnostic Tests – tool of assessment used to help narrow down
and identify areas of deficit to be targeted for intervention Measurement of Personality
2. Clinical Settings  Personality Tests (1920-1940) – measured presumably stable characteristics or
3. Counseling Settings traits that theoretically underlie behaviour.
4. Geriatric Settings

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© CONFESOR2016
 PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING
AND ASSESSMENT
QUICKNOTES BY:
Kristine Confesor

o Traits – relatively enduring dispositions (tendencies to act, P= percentile rank

think, or feel in a certain manner in any given circumstance) X,= score of interest
that distinguish one individual from another. B = number of scores below X,
o Robert S Woodworth – measure of adjustment and emotional N= total number of scores
stability that could be administered quickly and efficiently to
group of recruits (Personal Data Sheet)  Percentiles – specific scores or points within a distribution; divide the total
frequency for a set of observations into hundredths.
o Woodworth Personal Data Sheet – an early structured
personality test that assumed that a test response can be taken at
face value
DESCRIBING DISTRIBUTIONS
o Projective Tests – an individual is assumed to “project” onto
1. Mean – arithmetic average score in a distribution
some ambiguous stimulus his or her own unique needs, fears,
2. Standard Deviation – approximation of the average deviation around the mean;
hopes, and motivation.
square root of variance
o Rorschach Inkblot test: highly controversial projective test
that provided an ambiguous stimulus and asked the subject what
𝛴 (𝑋 – 𝑋) 2
it might be 𝜎= √
o Thematic Apperception test: projective test that provided 𝑁
ambiguous pictures and asked subjects to make up a story
o Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI):
structured personality test that made no assumptions about the 3. Variance – measure of variability equal to the arithmetic mean of the squares of
meaning of a test response. Such meaning was to be determined the differences between the scores in a distribution and their mean
by empirical research 𝛴 (𝑋 – 𝑋) 2
o 16PF: A structured personality test based on the statistical 𝜎² = 𝑁
procedure of factor analysis

4. Z Score – transforms data into standardized units that are easier to interpret;
difference between a score and the mean, divided by the standard deviation
Culture and Assessment
 𝑋,– 𝑋)
Culture– socially transmitted behaviour patterns, beliefs, and products of work of
a particular population, community, or group of people
𝑧= 𝑆
 Henry S Goddard – highly instrumental in getting Binet’s test adopted for use in
various settings in the US who raised questions about how meaningful such tests
are when used with people from various cultural language and backgrounds
 Verbal Communication – language is a key yet sometimes overlooked variable
in the assessment process. - Correlation and Regression
Expression of degree and direction of correspondence between two thing.
Coefficient of Correlation – numerical index that expresses this relationship: It tells us
the extent to which X and Y are co-related.
 Pearson r –when the relationship is linear and when the two variables being
Norms and Basic Statistics for Testing correlated are continuous
 Tests– devices used to translate observations into numbers  Coefficient of Determination – indication of how much variance is shared by the
 Purpose of Statistics X- and the Y- variables.
o Descriptive Statistics – are methods used to provide a concise description  Spearman Rho – rank-order correlation coefficient when sample size is fewer than
of a collection of quantitative information 30 and when both sets of measurements are in ordinal or rank-order form.
o Inferential Statistics – used to make inferences from observations of a
small group of people known as a sample to a larger group of individuals
GRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF CORRELATION
known as population.
1. Bivariate distribution
2. Scatter Diagram
3. Scattergram
SCALES OF MEASUREMENT
4. Scatterplot – useful in revealing curvilinearity in a relationship (eyeball guage” of
 Properties
how curved the graphy is
1. Magnitude – property of moreness. A scale has the property of magnitude
if we can say that a particular instance of the attribute represents more,
less, or equal amounts of the given quantity than does another instance.
2. Equal Intervals – if the difference between two points at any place o the
 Regression – analysis of relationships among variables for the purpose of
scale has the same meaning as the difference between two other points
understanding how one variable may predict another.
that differ by the same number of scale units.
 Simple Regression – X (predictor variable); Y (outcome variable); results in an
3. Absolute Zero- when nothing of the property being measured exists.
equation for a regression line.
 Regression Line – line of best fit
Type of Scale Magnitude Equal Intervals Absolute 0  Multiple Regression – takes into account the intercorrelations among all variables
Nominal No No No involved; correlation among predictor scores
Ordinal Yes No No
Interval Yes Yes No  Meta-analysis – family of techniques used to statistically combine information
Ratio Yes Yes Yes across studies to produce single estimates of the statistics beig studied

 Culture and Inference

 Ordinal: IQ Tests
 Interval: Temperature on C and F
 Ratio: Kelvin Scale; Yards, Speed

- Reliability
 Frequency Distributions – displays scores on a variable or a measure to - Validity
reflect how frequently each value was obtained. - Writing and Evaluating Test Items
 Positive Skew – relatively few scores fall at the high end of the distribution - Test Administration
(e.g. the test was too difficult)
 Negative Skew – When relatively few of the scores fall at the low end of the
distribution (e.g. the test was too easy)
 Percentile Rank– an expression of the percentage of people whose score on
a test or measure falls below a particular raw score, or a converted score that
refers to a percentage of testtakers; contrast with percentage correct

P = B/N x 100 = percentile rank of Xi

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© CONFESOR2016