Psychological Assessment - Midterms

Standardization

ensures that everything is the same for all participants

Standardization

Making sure that every single person gets the test under standard conditions ensures that everyone gets a fair shot at the test.

Normative Test

compares your answers to the answers of others in the same group as you

Norms

results obtained by giving the exam to a sample of people who represent all test-takers

Norms

allow you to compare your test scores with others

Norms

allow a person to understand how they measure up in comparison to their peers

Standardized Assessments

assessments constructed by experts and published for use in many different schools and classrooms

Standardized Assessments

They can be used to evaluate a student's understanding and knowledge for a particular area

Standardized Assessments

They can be used to evaluate admissions potential for a student in grade school or college

Standardized Assessments

They can be used to assess language and technical skill proficiency.

Standardized Assessments

Often used to determine psychological services.

Standardized Assessments

They are even used to evaluate aptitude for a career in the armed forces

Standardized Assessment Qualities

all students taking the particular assessment are given the same instructions and time limit

Standardized Assessment Qualities

Instructional manuals typically accompany the assessment so teachers or proctors know exactly what to say

Standardized Assessment Qualities

assessments contain the same or very similar questions

Standardized Assessment Qualities

the assessments are scored, or evaluated, with the same criteria.

Four Main Types of Standardized Assessments Used by Schools

• achievement assessments

• scholastic aptitude and intelligence assessments

• specific aptitude assessments

• school readiness assessments

Achievement Assessments

designed to assess how much students have learned from classroom instruction

Assessment items

typically reflect common curriculum used throughout schools across the state or nation

Advantage of Achievement Assessments

provide information regarding how much a student has learned about a subject

Advantage of Achievement Assessments

provide information on how well students in one classroom compare to other students

Advantage of Achievement Assessments

provide a way to track student progress over time

Disadvantage of Achievement Assessments

do not indicate how much a student has learned for a particular area within the subject

Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

designed to assess a general capacity to learn and used to predict future academic achievement

Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

may assess what a student is presumed to have learned in the past

Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

these assessments include vocabulary terms presumably encountered over the years and analogies intended to assess how well students can recognize similarities among well- known relationships

Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

the most common type of these assessments is the SAT

Advantage of Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

the same test allows for comparison of multiple students across schools and states

Disadvantage of Scholastic Aptitude Assessments

some students develop test anxiety and do not perform well on standardized scholastic assessments, causing the results to be an inaccurate reflection of the student's actual or potential academic abilities

Specific Aptitude Assessments

designed to predict future ability to succeed in a particular content domain

Specific Aptitude Assessments

may be used by school personnel to select students for specific instructional programs or remediation programs

Specific Aptitude Assessments

may also be used for counseling students about future educational plans and career choices

Specific Aptitude Assessments

one commonly used assessment to evaluate one's aptitude for a career in the armed forces is the ASVAB

Specific Aptitude Assessments

usually, one's ability to learn in a specific discipline is stable, and therefore, these types of assessments are an effective way to identify academic tendencies and weaknesses

Disadvantage of Specific Aptitude Assessments

the use of these assessments encourages specific skill development in a few areas, opposed to encouraging the development of skills in a wide range of academic disciplines and abilities

School Readiness Assessments

designed to assess cognitive skills important for success in a typical kindergarten or first grade curriculum

School Readiness Assessments

these assessments are typically given six months before a child enters school

Advantage of School Readiness Assessments

they provide information regarding developmental delays that need to be addressed immediately

Disadvantage of School Readiness Assessments

the evaluation has been found to have low correlation with the student's actual academic performance beyond the first few months of school

Disadvantage of School Readiness Assessments

usually only evaluate cognitive development. However, social and emotional development are critical to one's success in kindergarten and first grade.

Guideline/Consideration in Choosing Standardized Assessments

The school should choose an assessment that has a high validity for the particular purpose of testing. Meaning that if the school wants to assess knowledge of its student's science comprehension, it should choose an assessment that evaluates science knowledge and skills.

Guideline/Consideration in Choosing Standardized Assessments

The school should make sure the group of students used to 'norm' the assessment are similar to the population of the school.

Guideline/Consideration in Choosing Standardized Assessments

The school should take the student's age and developmental level into account before administering any standardized assessments

Formative and Summative Assessments

other forms of assessment that are given at different times

Formative Assessments

ongoing assessments, reviews and observations used to evaluate students in the classroom

Formative Assessments

teachers use these types of assessments to continually improve instructional methods and curriculum

Formative Assessments

student feedback is also a type of this assessment.
ex: quizzes, lab reports and chapter exams

Summative Assessments

used to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction at the end of an academic year or end of the class

Summative Assessments

allow educators to evaluate student comprehensive competency and final achievement in the subject or discipline

Summative Assessments

examples of these assessment include final exams, statewide tests and national tests

Raw Score

the score based solely on the number of correctly answered items on the assessment

Raw Score

this score will tell you how many questions the student got right, but just the score itself won't tell you much more

Normal Distribution

all test scores fall along a ________

Normal Distribution

A pattern of educational characteristics or scores in which most scores lie in the middle range and only a few lie at either extreme. To put it simply, some scores will be low and some will be high, but most scores will be moderate.

The normal distribution shows two things:

1. The variability or spread of the scores.

2. The midpoint of the normal distribution. This midpoint is found by calculating a mean of all of the scores, or, in other words, the mathematical average of a set of scores

Normal Distribution Curve

helps us find the standard deviation of the scores

Standard deviation

a useful measure of variability

Standard deviation

measures the average deviation from the mean in standard units

deviation

defined as the amount an assessment score differs from a fixed value, such as the mean

mean and standard deviation

can be used to divide the normal distribution into several parts

Mean

The vertical line at the middle of the curve shows the ______

Standard deviation

the lines to either side reflect the ______

standard deviation

A small ____________ tells us that the scores are close together, and a large number tells us that they are spread apart more.

68-95-99.7

In statistics, there is a rule called the ________ rule

68-95-99.7 rule

This rule states that for a normal distribution, almost all values lie within one, two or three standard deviations from the mean.

68%

Specifically, approximately ____ of all values lie within one standard deviation of the mean

95%

Approximately ___ of all values lie within two standard deviations of the mean

99.7%

Approximately ___ of all values lie within three standard deviations of the mean

standard score

A common method to transform raw scores in order to make them more comparable to a larger population is to use a ___________

standard score

the score that indicates how far a student's performance is from the mean with respect to standard deviation units