Chapter 9-Psychological Testing

Question 1

Psychological tests

Answer 1

-a standardized measure of a sample of a person’s behaviour.
-they’re used to measure the individual differences that exist among people in such things as intelligence, aptitudes, interests, and aspects of personality.

Question 2

Intelligence tests

Answer 2

**intelligence is an invisible individual difference (i.e., varies among people, and cannot be measured directly).

-intelligence tests measure general intellectual ability (very broad domain).

Question 3

Aptitude tests

Answer 3

-aptitude tests measure intellectual potential for a specific domain.

Question 4

Achievement tests

Answer 4

-achievement tests gauge a person’s mastery and knowledge of previously learned material (in a relatively narrow domain).
e.g., final exam

Question 5

Personality tests

Answer 5

-personality tests measure various aspects of personality, including motives, interests, values, and attitudes.
-many psychologists prefer to call these “personality scales” because the questions have no right or wrong answers.
e.g., meausring extraversion

Question 6

Test norms

Answer 6

“how do i rank on a test compared to others?”
-based on a standardization group; large representation of individuals that take that test.
-can be converted into percentiles (e.g., 60th percentile means only 40% of test-takers scored higher than you, and 60% of test-takers scored the same as you, or lower).
-differ on the basis of culture (e.g., east vs. west).

**errors can render test scores less effective;
-random (e.g., exhaustion, hunger) vs. systematic (e.g., lack of equivalency; people from one cultural context might do better than people from another)

Question 7

Reliability

Answer 7

def: refers to the measurement consistency of a test (or of other kinds of measurement techniques).

-common way to estimate a test’s reliability: check test–retest reliability, which is done by comparing participants’ scores on two administrations of a test to see if scoring is similar (uses correlation coefficient).

Question 8

Validity

Answer 8

def: refers to the extent to which a test measures what it is intended to measure (accuracy in scoring).
-content validity
-criterion validity
-construct validity

Question 9

Content validity

Answer 9

how well the test covers the entire range of the concept it aims to measure (e.g., a math test includes all relevant topics, not just algebra).

Question 10

Criterion validity

Answer 10

**(looking at scores of different testing methods, regarding the same topic) i.e., how well test scores predict outcomes or correlate with other measures;
-predictive validity (e.g., SAT predicting college success).
-concurrent validity (e.g., comparing two IQ tests).

Question 11

Construct validity

Answer 11

how well the test measures the theoretical construct it claims to measure (e.g., does an anxiety scale actually measure anxiety?).