Lecture 17 Notes Psychological Tests Outline Psychological Tests Mental Ability Tests o Intelligence Tests o Aptitude Tests o Achievement Tests Norms and Standardization Reliability Validity o Content Validity o Criterion Validity o Construct Validity Personality Tests o Self report Investigations o Projective Tests Mental Ability Tests Intelligence tests measure intellectual potential and ability IQ test Aptitude tests measure ability in a particular domain evaluate whether individuals have the aptitude to succeed in a particular area SAT Achievement tests measure knowledge of a particular domain school tests When you give a test it is a sample of behavior it is not an absolute measure of ability You will get different scores on the same test depending on when you take the test Sources of error Individual factors how much people prepare physiological condition Tests measure differences among people Test factors time to do tests questions asked on test language etc Norms and Standardization help eliminate error Standardization same conditions for everyone all people who take SAT get same amount of time Norms what the score on the test means o A normed test compares a raw score to others in the same group your score is relative to others in the same group curved test Sat and IQ o All about percentile score Reliability if you want to measure something that you expect to remain stable over time the test should give the same score on various versions of the test and whenever you take the test IQ scores for example should be stable over the lifetime of the individual Validity IQ test Base IQ 100 intelligence Check reliability through test retest reliability have person take the test over and over and making sure that the scores for an individual are clustered around the same point score Makes sure that a test is measuring what it is supposed to measure o Content validity achievement tests does the test test the content of the domain it is supposed to cover a psychology test that asks you to solve a quadratic equation has low content validity o Criterion validity aptitude test is the test good at determining aptitude for a particular thing do people who score well on SAT tend to score well in college o Construct validity IQ test can be hard to tell if the test measures a hypothetical construct for example intelligence or personality cannot be objectively measured cannot be seen well at all essentially The extent to which a particular test can be shown to measure a hypothetical construct IQ tests measure general intelligence IQ tests used to give a score of mental age chronological age x 100 IQ test is normed to an age group this allows you to compare the IQ score of a grade school student to the IQ of a college student Does an IQ test have high construct validity Does the IQ test measure general o Aspects of general intelligence may be doing well in school consistently speed of thinking whether people are good with words how many accomplishments people have are people good in a variety of domains are they capable do people succeed in the society they live in measure this last one by looking at jobs and look at IQ scores of blue collar vs white collar jobs There IS a positive correlation between the level of job and IQ however this does not mean that IQ is measuring general intelligence because there is a third variable school is needed to get a high level job o There is no correlation between success in a given field and IQ o IQ is not a reliable measure of general intelligence does not have high construct validity because We have no precise definition of general intelligence IQ does not correlate with job success IQ 0 5 0 6 correlation coefficient is a good aptitude test it is a good measure of ability to do academic work at any level of schooling
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