Testing and Individual Difference Flashcards
assessment
A method of obtaining information about a person’s intellectual function or personality characteristics using any combination of interviews, questionnaires, specialized instruments, and observations.
crystallized intelligence
Mental ability that includes material learned over the entire life span, such as vocabulary and general knowledge of the world.
Down’s syndrome
A form of retardation caused by an extra chromosome and characterized by certain facial features and lower-than-normal brain size and weight.
fluid intelligence
The intellectual ability that involves succeeding in new tasks or taking previous knowledge and applying it in a new way.
Flynn effect
The trend that IQ scores tend to rise by an average of three points per decade, although different areas of the world vary in the magnitude of the gains.
forced choice
A method of item construction on a questionnaire in which the respondent is required to choose one among a group of alternatives.
g factor
The general intelligence factor. Proposed by Charles Spearman, who argued that a basic ability underlies the performance of different intellectual tasks.
heritability
The degree to which variability in a characteristic, such as intellectual ability or a personality trait, can be explained by heredity.
intelligence
General mental ability; the ability to acquire information and to apply that information in order to understand the world.
IQ
A numerical index of intelligence as measured by any of a number of intelligence tests. IQ scores generally have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
multiple intelligences
A theory of intellectual functioning proposed by Howard Gardner, who suggested that individuals can demonstrate abilities in a variety of areas, such as spatial reasoning, musical ability, verbal-linguistic ability, and other areas.
primary mental abilities
A theory developed by Louis Leon Thurstone, who stated that individuals have six or seven primary mental abilities that make up intelligence. These primary abilities included word fluency, verbal comprehension, numerical ability, spatial ability, general reasoning, processing speed, and associative memory.
projective tests
A method of assessment in which the participant responds to an ambiguous stimulus, such as an inkblot. Scoring of projective measures is less reliable than scoring of objective measures.
Raven’s Matrices
A nonverbal test of intelligence that involves a series of matrix problems that get progressively more difficult.
reliability
The dependability of an assessment measure, or the degree to which the measure yields consistent scores across repeated administrations (known as test-retest reliability), or across different portions of the assessment measure (known as internal consistency).
