AP PSYCH 5.10 Psychometric Principles and Intelligence Testing
Measuring Intelligence
- Real intelligence tests need to have at least three traits
- Standardization, or what an individual’s score is compared against
- Reliability, the stability of the score over time
- Validity, the ability of a test to measure what is intended
Standardization
- Standardization starts with giving many sample pretests to many people before the test is administered officially
- From those pretests, we can see the number of answers people get right
- A pattern will hopefully start to develop
- Few people get most questions right
- Most people get some questions right
- Few people get most questions right
- Tests can be designed with different intentions in mind so this may look a little different
- An test designed to be extremely hard will want to see most people doing poorly
- A test designed to be very easy will want most people to get many answers right
Reliability
- If you take an intelligence test, then take a different version of the same test, you should get a similar score
- If the same person gets wildly different scores on a test meant to be the same difficulty, it is not reliable
- A good test must correlate with another version of the test to be reliable
- The split-in-half method helps to ensure testing correlation
- If a tester does better one one part of a tests than another part, the test is not correlated with itself
- The higher the self-correlation, the higher the reliability
Validity
- Validity is the most important issue in the formation of a test
- Just because a test is reliable does not mean that it is valid
- A broken scale might be reliable-- It gives the same weight every time-- But it is not valid
- Validity means to measure what is intended
Content Validity
- The extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest
- What you think of when thinking of validity
Construct Validity
- Similar to operationalization
- How well an abstract idea is translated into something measurable
Criterion Validity
- Correlation to an outside measure
- If a test claims someone is a genius, but they can’t tell left from right, there might not be criterion validity
Predictive Validity
- The success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict
- Assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior
- The SAT has had many problems with predictive validity
- For a long time, it was a horrible measure if you would actually do well if college or not
- There was a period of time where no colleges accepted it because its predictive validity was so distorted
- The SAT has undergone many edits to improve this metric
Scores on The Normal Curve
- Remember that the normal curve is a bell shaped curve, an ideal distribution of scores
- IQ scores fall into a normal curve
- Few people get most questions right
- Most people get some questions right
- Few people get most questions right
- This pattern is standard
- Not all scores are average, some deviate from the standard
- 100 is the average score
- 85 to 100 or 100 to 115 is one standard deviation away
- A standard deviation is 15 points
- 68% of people fall within one standard deviation of 100 (85-115)
- 95% of people fall within two standard deviations (70-130)
- Beyond two deviations is unusual
- Having an IQ score below 70 is considered an intellectual disability
- Having an IQ above 130 is considered gifted