MODULE 1-1: Introduction to Psychological Testing and Assessment

This module shall discuss the significant historical developments, origins, and rationale in psychological testing as well as the meaning and the purpose of psychological test.

China (2200 B.C)

Historians noted that a rudimentary form of assessment existed in ____. when the emperor had his officials examined in every third year to determine their fitness for the office.

Han Dynasty

Written exams were introduced in _____.

Physiognomy

the notion that we can judge the inner character of people from their outward appearance

Aristotle

He published a short treatise based on the premise that the soul and the body “sympathize” with each other.

Phrenology

It means reading bumps on the head (cranial bumps).

Sir Francis Galton

German physician that founded phrenology. He attempted to measure intellect by means of reaction time and sensory discrimination.

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He is the father of mental testing.

Alfred Binet

French psychologist that invented the first modern intelligence test in 1905.

Goddard

He first translated the Binet scales in the United States.

**Lewis Terman**

He popularized IQ testing with his revision of the Binet scales in 1916.

Stanford-Binet

the unquestioned prestige of the _____ was the use of the now familiar IQ for expressing test results.

Robert Yerkes

He convinced the U.S. government and the army that all of its recruits should be given intelligence tests for purposes of classification and assignment.

Otis

The Army Alpha was based on the then unpublished work of ______.

Army Alpha

It consisted of eight verbally loaded tests for average and high-functioning recruits.

Army Beta

It was a nonverbal group test designed for use with illiterates and recruits whose first language was not English.

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It consisted of various visual-perceptual and motor tests.

David Wechler

In 1939, he developed new nonverbal parts to go along with the verbal parts of the test.

Monroe Survey

Survey conducted in the PH in 1925

Prosser Survey

Survey conducted in the PH in 1930

UNESCO Survey

Survey conducted in the PH in 1939

RA 10029

the Philippine Psychology Act of 2009

Test construction

Effective test use requires some familiarity with_____.

Psychology

the science which seeks to measure and explain facts of intellect, character and other aspects of man’s personal life.

Intra-individual differences

refer to differences found within the same individual

Inter-individual

refers to differences recognizable between 2 or more people.

Psychometrician

refers to a specialist in psychology or education who develops and evaluates psychological tests.

test

it is a standardized procedure for sampling procedure and describing it with categories or scores.

psychological test

It is a set of standardized and objective occasions for response presented to an individual with the purpose of eliciting a reliable and valid sample of his behavior.

Standardization

quality of a test if the procedures for administering and scoring it are uniform from one examiner, and from one setting to another.

individual being tested.

In a test situation, the single independent variable is often the ____.

directions

Standardization rests largely upon the ____ for administration found in the instructional manual that typically accompanies the tests.

Objectivity

the administration, scoring, and interpretation of scores are objective insofar as they are independent of the subjective judgment of the particular examiner

Objectivity

Other ways in which psychological tests can be properly described as objective are in the determination of the difficulty level and discrimination value of an item or a whole test.

Reliability

It may be checked by comparing the scores obtained by the same test takers at different times, with different sets of items, with different examiners or scorers or under any other relevant testing condition.

Validity

It is the degree to which the test actually measures what it purports to measure

independent external criteria

The determination of validity usually requires ______ of whatever test is designed to measure.

Norms

the average performance of the standardization sample on the test

Item writing

* Done by experts in the various areas to be tested.
* Items are composed to cover a wide range of difficulty
* More items should be created than will be used in the final test

Item editing

* Done by several persons
* Each item is **checked**
* Defective items are either revamped or discarded.

face validity

The property of an item that gives it the appearance of measuring what the test as a whole is supposed to measure.

Item tryout

It is administering the entire pool of items, presented in the format of an actual test, to a large, representative sample from the population for which the test is intended to obtain enough data

Item analysis

* most technical aspect of the whole process
* Involving a number of psychometric and statistical methods. The essential information provided by an item analysis are the following:


1. the difficulty level (percentage passing) of an item
2. the discriminability of each item
3. analysis of incorrect responses to determine

raw scores

The distribution of _____ (number correct) in a large representative sample of the target population is converted to percentiles, IQs, or other forms of standardized scores

standard error of measurement

Determination of the test’s reliability and _______ in the normative population is also a part of the standardization procedure

validation

* Test scores are correlated with the appropriate criterion performance
* Often validity coefficients are determined for different subgroups or for different criteria