Unit 11: Testing and Individual Differences Flashcards
Mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations.
Intelligence
A method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores.
Intelligence Test
A general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test.
General Intelligence (g)
A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person’s total score.
Factor Analysis
A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing.
Savant Syndrome
In psychology, grit is passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals.
Grit
The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.
Emotional Intelligence
A measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8.
Mental Age
The widely used American revision (by Terman at Standford University) of Binet’s original intelligence Stanford-Binet test
Stanford-Binet
Defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100. On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100, with scores assigned to relative performance above or below average.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
A test designed to assess what a person has learned.
Achievement Test
A test designed to predict a person’s future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn.
Aptitude test
Most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests.
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
Defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group.
Standardization
The symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes.
Normal Curve
