Professional, ethical and practicalities of testing Flashcards
What are the areas of psychological testing/assessment?
Achievement Adaptive behaviour Aptitude Cognitive testing/Intelligence testing Memory Mental health assessment (mental status examination) Personality Vocational
What is a psychological test or instrument?
- Based on a test theory and psychological theories
- Requires in depth knowledge to interpret
- Sound psychometric properties: reliability and validity
- Explicit empirical mechanism for interpreting scores
- Requires standardised administration and scoring
Draws inferences about broader underlying behaviours and attributes from a sample of behaviour
What are the main areas of professional practice in which psychological testing takes place?
Clinical Clinical Neuro Educational Forensic Organisational
Why administer psychological tests?
To plan intervention
To diagnose
For consideration for funding
Employing new staff
Competent psychometric assessment embraces what 13 practices ?
- Basic psychometric principles and procedures
- Psychological theory underlying psychometric assessment
- Ensuring appropriateness
- Most appropriate measure
- Organising and conducting tests
- Accurate scoring and use of norms
- Interpreting the results
- Communicating the results
- Making decisions on the basis of the results
- Monitoring effectiveness
- Confidentiality and security of test materials
- Professional and ethical issues
- Recognising and meeting the different requirements of special needs populations
What is the difference between testing and assessment?
Assessment: broader collection of a lot of different info
Testing: one measure
How does the ‘orange’s test’ in their labelling of lemons as ‘not sweet’ explain the problems of early IQ testing?
Labelled from the beginning - pigeon holing
Minority groups over-represented in low functioning categories
Only taps western valued constructs of IQ
Norms from only one culture
Cultural Biases in tests
How can intellectual disability testing of other cultures be improved?
Combined assessment: IQ test results Adaptive Behaviour test results History taken into account (Ensure test norms are representative of many cultures)
What are the criteria for eligibility for funding in intellectual disability?
a) A score on a recognised test of cognitive ability
If a child was to miss out on funding by 1 mark, and you were asked to change the score what should you do?
Be fully confident on your scoring (by checking your scoring, particularly items of subjective judgement)
Refuse to change the score if correct
If as a psych you are subpoenaed to provide client files but under the code are not allowed to show testing booklets to non-psychologists, what should you do?
Follow the law but make an effort not to break the code by:
Not keeping the booklet in clients’ files
Not keeping the booklet after testing is finished
Supplying the booklet but including a note that it can only be viewed by a registered psych
Should the hospital require all files to be keep under the one client file, what should a psychologist do with their confidential files - include them or not?
Not include them and establish why the confidential files will always need to remain separate
If a company was to contract you as a psychologist to test potential job applicants and then one individual tested came back wanting to know more information about their scores what should you do?
Before testing you should have made clear verbally or in writing who is the client and who has access to what information
You can’t disclose the information to them because they are not the client
