Historical periods

Question 1

Remote background year

Answer 1

up to 1840

Question 2

remote background factors

Answer 2

• philosophers’ concern for what was common
• oral examinations
• chinese civil service exams

Question 3

setting the stage years

Answer 3

1840-1880

Question 4

setting the stage people

Answer 4

(1) Horace Mann - formal written exams (boston school committee; advocated for improvement in the way schools evaluate their students
(2) Darwin - theory of evolution and got people thinking about differences between species and individuals
(3) Wilhelm Wundt - experimental psychology 1879

Question 5

setting the stage factors

Answer 5

• concern for mental illness increased (diagnostic methods emerged)
• formal written exams (horace mann and school evals)
• evolution theory/individual differences (darwin)
• experimental psychology in 1879; Wundt’s psychophysics lab; emphasized standardization and precise measurements, many key figures trained here

Question 6

the roots years

Answer 6

1880-1915

Question 7

the roots people

Answer 7

(1) Francis Galton - founder of psychological testing (darwin’s cousin); invented the bivariate distribution/scatterplot
(2) Alfred Binet - father of intelligence testing; Binet Simon scale in 1905
(3) Charles Spearman - first empirically based theory of intelligence; developed early form of factor analysis

Question 8

the roots factors

Answer 8

• 3 important people (Galton, Binet, Spearman)
• concern for reliability; test authors concerned with unreliability of essay and oral exams –> new type of achievement tests that could be scored objectively (concern to make education scientific and increase scorer reliability)

Question 9

the flowering years

Answer 9

1915-1940

Question 10

the flowering people

Answer 10

(1) Terman - revised the Binet-Simon scale into the Stanford-Binet in 1916
(2) Otis - revised the Stanford-Binet into group administered forms in 1918 (WW1)
(3) Wechsler - Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale 1939

Question 11

the flowering factors

Answer 11

• prolific publication of new tests
• stanford binet
• group administered forms of stanford binet
• rorschach inkblots
• Wechsler bellevue intelligence scale
• 3 signification publications
  (1) Psychometric
  (2) Educational and Psychological Measurement
  (3) Mental Measurements Yearbook

Question 12

consolidation years

Answer 12

1940-1965

Question 13

consolidation people

Answer 13

(1) Cronbach - Essentials of Psychological Testing 1949 textbook
(2) Anastasi - Psychological Testing 1954 textbook

Question 14

consolidation factors

Answer 14

• further development of tests (new or revised)
• the application of testing in WW2, clinical practice, schools, and industry
• major textbooks summarizing the field (cronbach and anastasi)

Question 15

just yesterday years

Answer 15

1965-2000

Question 16

just yesterday factors

Answer 16

• emergence of item response theory (relates performance on an item to status on the trait/ability underlying the scale)
• legislative and judicial activism (accountability movement in education; civil rights movement; appropriate use of tests with disabled individuals)
• public criticism (particularly against standardized tests of ability and achievement)
• influence of computers on recent testing

Question 17

now years

Answer 17

2000-present

Question 18

now factors

Answer 18

• explosive increase in number and diversity of tests
• influence of managed care (calls for more focused testing; demands careful links between diagnosis and treatment and between treatment and outcomes)
• emergence of evidence based practice
• increase in online administration/reporting of tests and development of computer programs that simulate human judgement in the analysis of test responses