Psychological Assessment & Testing

History of Testing and Assessment

• 1905: Alfred Binet published a test designed to help place Paris school children in appropriate classes

Types of Assessment

• Educational: evaluates abilities and skills relevant in a school context
• Retrospective: draws conclusions about psychological aspects of a person as they existed at some point in time prior to the assessment
• Remote: subject is not in physical proximity to the person conducting the evaluation
• Ecological Momentary: "in the moment" evaluation of specific problems and related cognitive and behavioral variables at the very time and place that they occur
• Collaborative: the assessor and assessee work as "partners" from initial contact through final feedback
• Therapeutic: therapeutic self-discovery and new understanding are encouraged
• Dynamic: describes an interactive approach to psychological assessment that usually follows the model: evaluation > intervention of some sort > evaluation

Psychological Testing

• Process of measuring psychology-related variables by means of devices or procedures designed to obtain a sample of behavior
• Usually numerical in nature
• Can be individual or group in administration
• Test administrators can be interchangeable without affecting the evaluation
• Requires technician-like skills in terms of administration and scoring
• Yields a test score or a series of test scores

Psychological Assessment

• Answers the referral question through the use of different tools of evaluation
• Administered individually
• Assessor is the key to the process of selecting tests and/or other tools of evaluation
• Requires an educated selection of tools of evaluation, skill in evaluation, and thoughtful organization and integration of data
• Entails logical problem-solving that brings to bear many sources of data assigned to answer the referral question

Test Components

• Content: subject matter
• Format: form, plan, structure, arrangement, layout
• Item: a specific stimulus to which a person responds overtly and this response is being scored or evaluated
• Administration Procedures: one-to-one basis or group administration
• Score: code or summary of statement, usually but not necessarily numerical in nature, but reflects an evaluation of performance on a test
• Scoring: the process of assigning scores to performances
• Cut-Score: reference point derived by judgment and used to divide a set of data into two or more classification

Psychological Measurement

• Psychometric Soundness: technical quality
• Psychometrics: science of psychological measurement
• Psychometrist or Psychometrician: refers to a professional who uses, analyzes, and interprets psychological data

Types of Tests

• Achievement Test: measures previous learning
• Aptitude Test: refers to the potential for learning or acquiring a specific skill
• Intelligence Test: refers to a person's general potential to solve problems, adapt to changing environments, abstract thinking, and profit from experience
• Human Ability Test: considerable overlap of achievement, aptitude, and intelligence test

Personality Tests

• Structured Personality Tests: provide statements, usually self-report, and require the subject to choose between two or more alternative responses
• Projective Personality Tests: unstructured, and the stimulus or response are ambiguous

Interview

• Method of gathering information through direct communication involving reciprocal exchange
• Panel Interview (Board Interview): more than one interviewer participates in the assessment
• Motivational Interview: used by counselors and clinicians to gather information