Psy Testing Flashcards
Importance of Psychological Tests (5)
Decisions for:
- Early School Placement
- College Entrance Decisions
- Military Job Selections
- Career Choices
- Psychological Adjustments
Characteristics of Psychological Tests (3)
- Sample of behavior
- Obtained under standardized conditions
- Established scoring rules for obtaining quantitative information from behavior sample
Why is standardization vital?
- Referential in nature - performance is measured relatively to everybody else’s performance
- Reduces between subject variability due to extraneous variables.
- Administered in mass
Difference between subjective and objective scoring rules
Objective Scoring Rules: Most mass produced tests fall into this category. Different qualified examiners will all come to the same score for an identical set of responses.
Subjective Scoring Rules: When the judgment of the examiner is an important part of the test, different examiners can legitimately come to different conclusions concerning the same sample of behavior. There conclusions should be similar, however.
Categories of Psychological Tests (3)
- Specific Task Performance Tests
- Observations of the Subject’s behavior within a particular context
- Self-report measures
What are specific tasks performance tests
Referred to as “Tests of maximal performance”; designed to uncover what an individual can do, given the specific test conditions.
- Two underlying assumptions:
- The subject understands what is required of the test.
- The subject exerts maximal effort to succeed.
What is an observation of the subject’s behavior within a particular context?
Examiner might observe subject having a conversation or some other social interaction.
What are self-report measures?
Subject describes their feelings, attitudes, beliefs, or interests.
Frequently subject to self-censorship.
Items are frequently included to measure the extent to which people provide socially desirable responses s/t self-serving bias
History: Circa 1000 BC (Chinese)
Chinese introduced written tests for civil service positions
History: 1850 (US)
US begins civil service examinations
History: 1890 (Cattell)
Mental test for college students - strength, resistance to pain and reaction time
History: 1905(Binet-Simon)
Scale of mental development used to classify mentally retarded children in France
History: 1914 (US)
WWI army recruitment - Alpha and Beta test
History: 1916 (Terman)
Develops Stanford-Binet Test and coined IQ
History: 1920-1940
Factor Analysis, Projective tests and Personality Inventories
History: 1941-1960
Vocational interest measured
History: 1961-1980
Item response theory and neuropsychological testing developed
History: 1980 - present
Computerized testing
Examples of Fluid Attributes
Mood
Attitude
Opinions
Personal values
Example of Stable Attributes
Intelligence
Interest
Example of Relative Attributes
Ability
Interest
Personality
Reasons why intelligence is a valid and useful construct
- wide variety of mental processing tasks show systematic individual variation.
- related to success in a wide variety of life tasks: school performance, training programs, and work behaviors.
What is General Mental Ability/Intelligence?
performance of tasks involving the manipulation, retrieval, evaluation , and/or processing of information which shows individual differences.
What are the 7 primary mental abilities according to Thurstone (1938)?
- Verbal Comprehension - vocabulary, reading, verbal analogies
- Word Fluency — anagrams, rhyming tests
- Number – mathematical operations
- Space - spatial visualizations and mental transformation.
- Associative Memory – rote memory
- Perceptual Speed – quickness in noticing similarities and differences
- Reasoning - skill in inductive, deductive, and math problems
What was spearman’s theory of intelligence (1904)?
Two factor Theory - He believed that two cognitively demanding tasks are positively correlated.
Test = g + S +e
g = general intellectual factor* S = measurement error
What are Catell’s (1963) 2 types of general intelligence
Fluid Intelligence: the ability to see relationships, i.e. analogies and number and digit series completion.
Crystallized Intelligence: an individual’s acquired set of knowledge and skills.
In cognitive Psychology, crystallized intelligence is furthered classified into?
Declarative Knowledge: Fact based information
Procedural Knowledge: How to do things.
Two major group factors of general intelligence according to Vernon (1960)?
Verbal-Educational, and Spatial - Motor
Carrol (1993) has created 7 classes of broad abilities from the general factor g developed with the aid of factor analysis
- Fluid Intelligence
- Crystallized Intelligence
- General Memory
- Visual Perception
- Auditory Perception
- Retrieval Ability
- Cognitive Speediness
What was Guilford’s structure of intellect model?
Rejected the idea of g, but instead best seen in function of content, operations and product creating 180 different types of specific intellgience
What was Robert Sternberg’s conceptualization of intelligence?
Deals with how intelligent behavior is generated, what behaviors are intelligent in specific environments, and when a specific behavior is intelligent.
How was the IQ calculated according to the Stanford-Binet test?
IQ = (MA/CA) X 100
MA = mental age CA = Chronological (adult) age
In modern tests, how was the deviation of IQ obtained?
Average and scale
Characteristics of a good test of general mental ability?
- Broad sampling of tasks
- Sufficient number of items within task type
- Not test specific content
- Indifference of the indicator
Major classes of worker productivity measured by?
- Production counts
- Personnel Data
- Judgemental methods
What is the Hawthorne effect?
When people know their behavior is being monitored, they will change their behavior to create a favorable impression
2 Major Factors on the Job Performance Construct
- Performance on specific individual tasks in the JD
2. Behaviors necessarily for the organization to function smoothly