Psych Review Test 3 Testing and IQ o Standardized we say a test is standardized when the test items have been piloted on a similar population of people as those who are meant to take the test and achievement norms have been established Ex Consider the SAT test When you take the SAT you take an experimental section a group of questions on which you will not be evaluated In this case you are helping the SAT people to standardize future examinations Those people taking the SAT on a particular date are fairly representative of the population of people taking the SAT in general Such a group of people is known as the standardization sample The purpose of the test is to distinguish between people Therefore test questions that virtually everyone answers correctly as well as questions that almost no one can answer are discarded Thos items do not provide information that differentiates between people taking the test achievement norms Reliability measurement o Reliability refers to the repeatability or consistency of the test as a means of Ex if your were to take a test three times that purportedly determined what career you should pursue and on each occasion you received radically diff Recommendations you would question the reliability of the test o Split half reliability involves randomly dividing the test into two different sections and then correlating people s performances on the two halves The closer the coefficient is to 1 the greater the split half reliability of the test o Equivalent form reliability Many test are available in several different forms E F R is the correlation between performances on the different forms of the test o Test retest reliability refers to the correlation between a person s score on one administration of the test with the same person s score on a subsequent administration of the test Validity of the test o Valid when it measures what it is supposed to measure Often referred to the accuracy Ex A personality test is valid if it truly measures an individual s personality o A test cannot be valid if it is not reliable o A test may be reliable without being valid o Face validity refers to a superficial measure of accuracy A test of cake baking ability has high face validity if you are looking for chef but low face validity if you are in the market for a doctor A type of content validity o Content Validity refers to how well a measure reflects the entire range of material it is supposed to be testing Designing a test to find a good chef It would have to include him creating an entr e and whip up a salad dressing in addition to baking a cake This would have good content validity o Criterion related validity test can have two types of criterion related validity concurrent and predictive Concurrent validity measures how much of a characteristic a person has now Ex is a person a good chef Predictive validity a measure of future performance Ex Does a person have the qualities that would enable him or her to become a good chef o Construct validity most meaningful kind of validity How well a test measures the hypothetical construct of what we are trying to measure or are there other factors If an independent measure already exists that has been established to identify those who will make fine chefs and love their work we can correlate prospective chefs performance on this measure with their performance on any new measure The higher the correlation the more construct validity the new measure has The limitation of course is the difficulty in creating any measure that we believe is perfectly valid in the first place o Reliability refers to a test s consistency and validity refers to a test s accuracy Types of tests o Aptitude tests measure ability or potential Most if not all the tests you take in school are supposed to be achievement tests They are supposed to indicate how much you learned in a given subject o Achievement tests measure what one has learned or accomplished Any achievement test is supposed to be an aptitude test These tests are made to express someone s potential not his or her current level of achievement o Making a tests that exclusively measures one o these qualities is virtually impossible Whatever one s aptitude for a particular field or skill one s experience affects it Ex someone who has had a lot of schooling will score better on a test of mathematics aptitude than someone who might have an equally great potential to be a mathematician but who has never had formal training in math Also two people who achieved equal learning in biology will not necessarily score the same on an achievement test If one has far greater test taking aptitude she will likely outscore the other o Speed test generally consist of a large number of questions asked in a short amount of time Goal is to see how quickly a person can solve problems Therefore the time amount allotted should be insufficient to complete the problems o Power test to gauge the difficulty level of problems an individual can solve Consist of items of increasing difficulty levels Examinees are given sufficient time to work through as many problems as they can since the goal is to determine the ceiling difficulty level not their problem solving speed o Group tests administered to a large number of people at a time Generally instructions are provided dto the group and then people are given a certain amount of time to complete the various sections of the test Less expensive and more objective than individual tests o Individual tests involve greater interaction between the examiner and examinee Several IQ tests are individual tests Ex Rorschach inkblot test examiner attends to not only what the person says about the inkblots but also to the process by which she analyzes the stimuli Theories of intelligence o Intelligence the ability to gather and use information in productive ways o Charles Spearman whether intelligence refers to a single ability a small group of abilities or a wide variety of abilities He argues intelligence could be expressed by a single factor Underlying the many different specific abilities S that people regard as types of intelligence is a single factor that he named G o L L Thurstone and J P Guilford Thurston 7 main abilities Guilford well over 100 different mental abilities that intelligence in comprised of o Howard Gardner Multiple intelligences Three of his fall within traditionally labeled intelligences Linguistic logical mathematical and spatial The others are musical bodily
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