Types of Tests in Psychological Testing
Tests can be broadly grouped into two camps: group tests versus individual tests.
Group tests are largely pencil-and-paper measures suitable to the testing of large groups of persons at the same time.
Individual tests are instruments that by their design and purpose must be administered one on one.An important advantage of individual tests is that the examiner can gauge the level of motivation of the subject and assess the relevance of other factors (e.g., impulsiveness or anxiety) on the test results.
The Main Types of Psychological Tests
Intelligence Tests: Measure an individual's ability in relatively global areas such as verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, or reasoning and thereby help determine potential for scholastic work or certain occupations.
More topics related to Psychological Testing
Intelligence tests were originally designed to sample a broad assortment of skills in order to estimate the individual’s general intellectual level. The Binet-Simon scales were successful, in part, because they incorporated heterogeneous tasks, including word definitions, memory for designs, comprehension questions, and spatial visualization tasks.
Modern intelligence tests refers to a test that yields an overall summary score based on results from a heterogeneous sample of items. Of course, such a test might also provide a profile of subtest scores as well, but it is the overall score that generally attracts the most attention.
Aptitude Tests: Measure the capability for a relatively specific task or type of skill; aptitude tests are, in effect, a narrow form of ability testing.
Aptitude tests measure one or more clearly defined and relatively homogeneous segments of ability. Such tests come in two varieties: single aptitude tests and multiple aptitude test batteries. A single aptitude test appraises, obviously, only one ability, whereas a multiple aptitude test battery provides a profile of scores for a number of aptitudes.
Aptitude tests are often used to predict success in an occupation, training course, or educational endeavor. For example, the Seashore Measures of Musical Talents (Seashore, 1938), a series of tests covering pitch, loudness, rhythm, time, timbre, and tonal memory, can be used to identify children with potential talent in music.
The most common use of aptitude tests is to determine college admissions.
Achievement Tests: Measure a person's degree of learning, success, or accomplishment in a subject or task.
Achievement tests measure a person’s degree of learning, success, or accomplishment in a subject matter. The implicit assumption of most achievement tests is that the schools have taught the subject matter directly. The purpose of the test is then to determine how much of the material the subject has absorbed or mastered. Achievement tests commonly have several subtests, such as reading, mathematics, language, science, and social studies.
The distinction between aptitude and achievement tests is more a matter of use than content (Gregory, 1994a). In fact, any test can be an aptitude test to the extent that it helps predict future performance. Likewise, any test can be an achievement test insofar as it reflects how much the subject has learned.
Creativity Tests: Assess novel, original thinking and the capacity to find unusual or unexpected solutions, especially for vaguely defined problems.
Creativity tests assess a subject’s ability to produce new ideas, insights, or artistic creations that are accepted as being of social, aesthetic, or scientific value. Thus, measures of creativity emphasize novelty and originality in the solution of fuzzy problems or the production of artistic works.
People were especially impressed that creativity tests required divergent thinking—putting forth a variety of answers to a complex or fuzzy problem—as opposed to convergent thinking—finding the single correct solution to a well-defined problem.
Personality tests measure the traits, qualities, or behaviors that determine a person’s individuality; this information helps predict future behavior. These tests come in several different varieties, including checklists, inventories, and projective techniques such as sentence completions and inkblots.
A. Structured (objective): Provides a self-report statement to which the person responds “True” or “False,” “Yes” or “No.” Examples of objective personality tests include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (Millon,1994), Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001), and the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck & Steer, 1996)
B. Projective: Provides an ambiguous test stimulus; response requirements are unclear.example-Rorschach test
Interest Inventories: Measure an individual's preference for certain activities or topics and thereby help determine occupational choice. These tests are based on the explicit assumption that interest patterns determine and, therefore, also predict job satisfaction.
Behavioral Procedures: Objectively describe and count the frequency of a behavior, identifying the antecedents and consequences of the behavior , including checklists, rating scales, interviews, and structured observations. These methods share a common assumption that behavior is best understood in terms of clearly defined characteristics such as frequency, duration, antecedents, and consequences. Behavioral procedures tend to be highly pragmatic in that they are usually interwoven with treatment approaches.
The Parent-Child Interaction Assessment-II (PCIA; Holigrocki, Kaminski & Frieswyk, 1999) is an example of a direct observation procedure that is used with school-age children and parents. The parents and children are video recorded playing at a make-believe zoo. The Parent-Child Early Relational Assessment (Clark, 1999) is used to study parents and young children and involves a feeding and a puzzle task.
Neuropsychological Tests: Measure cognitive, sensory, perceptual, and motor performance to determine the extent, locus, and behavioral consequences of brain damage.Neuropsychological tests attempt to measure deficits in cognitive functioning (i.e., your ability to think, speak, reason, etc.) that may result from some sort of brain damage, such as a stroke or a brain injury.
it can be argued that neuropsychological tests at times offer an estimate of a person's peak level of cognitive performance. Neuropsychological tests are a core component of the process of conducting neuropsychological assessment. One popular test battery is the Halstead-Reitan Test Battery.
No comments:
Post a Comment