PSYCH ASSESSMENT INTRO & HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

designed to do measurement; in fact, the term is an abbreviation for ‘psychological measurement; refers to those things which are based upon a measurement process, including tests and questionnaires which are not tests.

is a sub-component of measurement, being focussed on those tasks/questions (called items) which have right or wrong answers, and are mostly referred to as cognitive, ability or aptitude tests.

is also a sub-component of measurement, although having items which do not have right or wrong answers.

for example, ask people to agree or disagree about a statement or to indicate whether a particular statement is true or false about them.A response to say a statement is false about me as an individual would, surely, not be a wrong answer. The term ___ is sometimes also used for these instruments

is concerned to discover not just what characteristics are possessed by a person, but also the way these are organized to make the individual different from others.

Measurement, non measurement

Correct/ incorrect item responses, Not using correct/incorrect responses

tests

questionnaires, inventories

Interviews, observations etc.; Other questionnaires/checklists etc

operates on the basis of clear criteria and standardized measurement scales.

is the assignment of numbers to properties or attributes of people,objects or events using a set of rules, according to Stevens.

refers to the integration of information from multiple sources in order to describe, predict, explain, diagnose and make decisions.

used testing some 4000 years ago for job selection purposes and appeared to be a test-dominated society

___ were established, including independent assessments by at least two assessors and the standardization of test conditions, as is done often today.

Greek philosophers,___ & ___ also discussed individual differences in their works.

Interest then declined during the ___

until a new recognition of ___ came in the sixteenth century Renaissance.

By the seventeenth century post Renaissance philosophers began to look at ideas,events and phenomena in more scientific ways, leading to a new way of thinking called ___.

said that all factual or true knowledge comes from experience and was developed by ___ into an organized school of thought

provided an account of the mechanisms of evolution between 1858 and 1877,

Darwin term ‘___' meant anything which could be attributed to an individual organism, for example agility or height.

Experimental psychologists such as ___, ___, & ___, discovered that psychological phenomena could be described in rational and quantitative ways.

a prolific writer and a zealous scientist. He was the first to emphasize the importance of individual differences, created the first tests of mental ability and was the first to use questionnaires.He discovered a number of statistical procedures to analyse data many still in use today, for example he found that a wide range of measures of human physiology and abilities produce what is still referred to as a ‘normal curve’, sometimes as the ‘bell curve’ or ‘normal distribution’ he studied maths atTrinity College, Cambridge, and suffered a breakdown before his finals so he didn’t get a very good honours degree. But, like his cousin, ___ adopted the new scientific ideas which he thought could be proven only by careful enquiry and used his wealth to pursue this. Among many other interests, he became obsessed with making all kinds of measurements of people in his research laboratory.

He constructed a series of tests, including short, varied problems about daily life, as well as tests of cognitive processes such as memory. They were made up of a series of tasks thought to be representative of a typical child’s abilities at different ages. Binet ranked the tests in accordance with age levels corresponding to performances by the average child. In doing so he distinguished between the mental age attained on the scale and the chronological age of a child. The outcomes, developed with his assistant Theodore Simon, were received throughout the world with wide acclaim

In the United States ___ standardized the Binet­Simon scale using sampling methods, resulting in what has since been called the Stanford­Binet Intelligence Test

Galton’s works also influenced ___ who was noted for saying:

One of the most productive scaling theorists was ___, a mechanical engineer, who made important contributions to psychology.

is best known for his contribution to psychometrics through the development of a group of statistical models known as Rasch models (Rasch, 1980). His work has had an influence on later adaptive testing by computers which have been used for the administration of tailored tests. In these the selection of questions to give a precise estimate of ability is based upon a rigorous model.

One of the twentieth century’s foremost contributors was ___, whose first degree was in chemistry and physics. He had a major influence on the theoretical development of personality as he sought to apply empirical techniques to understand its basic structure (Cattell, 1965). He extended existing methods of factor analysis and explored new approaches to assessment, and has been unrivalled in the creation of a unified theory of individual differences, combining research in intelligence with that of personality.

The first person to emphasize that different cultures have alternative concepts of what an ‘intelligent person’ is and that traditional tests measure only skills valued in academia and work in industrialized societies was sometimes referred to as ‘the test guru.’

whose two major interests were psychometrics and Freudian theory. He did much to explain what has become an increasingly complex field and provided evaluations of the most widely-used tests. In his last book The New Psychometrics: Science,Psychology and Measurement (1998), he argued that truly scientific forms of measurement could be developed to provide a new psychometrics which would transform psychology from a social to a pure science. The development of diagnostic assessm

extended the classification and played a key role in beginning modern psychiatry.

also contributed significantly to the concepts of mental disease and its classification. Influenced by experimental psychology, ___ also pioneered psychological testing with psychiatric patients.

Another traditional form of assessment widely used in health settings has involved projection, including the ___ & ___, which ask people to describe ambiguous visual stimuli