Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Psychology Psychological tests Psychological tests The primary motivation for the development of the major tests used today was the need for practical guidelines for solving social problems. The first useful intelligence test was prepared in 1905 by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon. The two developed a 30-item scale to ensure that no child could be denied instruction in the Paris school system without formal examination. In 1916 the American psychologist Lewis Terman produced the first Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon scale to provide comparison standards for Americans from age three to adulthood. The test was further revised in 1937 and 1960, and today the Stanford-Binet remains one of the most widely used intelligence tests. The need to classify soldiers during World War I resulted in the development of two group intelligence tests—Army Alpha and Army Beta. To help detect soldiers who might break down in combat, the American psychologist Robert Woodworth designed the Personal Data Sheet, a forerunner of the modern personality inventory. During the 1930s controversies over the nature of intelligence led to the development of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, which not only provided an index of general mental ability but also revealed patterns of intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The Wechsler tests now extend from the preschool through the adult age range and are at least as prominent as the Stanford-Binet. As interest in the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis grew in the 1930s, two important projective techniques introduced systematic ways to study unconscious motivation: the Rorschach or inkblot test—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach—using a series of inkblots on cards, and a story-telling procedure called the Thematic Apperception Test—developed by the American psychologists Henry A. Murray and C. D. Morgan. Both of these tests are frequently included in contemporary personality assessment. During World War II the need for improved methods of personnel selection led to the expansion of large-scale programs involving multiple methods of personality assessment. Following the war, training programs in clinical psychology were systematically supported by U.S. government funding, to ensure availability of mental-health services to returning war veterans. As part of these services, psychological testing flourished, reaching an estimated several million Americans each year. Since the late 1960s increased awareness and criticism from both the public and professional sectors have led to greater efforts to establish legal controls and more explicit safeguards against misuse of testing materials. The first intelligence tests were short-answer exams designed to predict which students might need special attention to succeed in school. Because intelligence tests were used to make important decisions about people's lives, it was almost inevitable that they would become controversial. Today, intelligence tests are widely used in education, business, government, and the military. However, psychologists continue to debate what the tests actually measure and how test results should be used. Interest in measuring individual differences in mental ability began in the late 19th century, Sir Frances Galton, a British scientist, was among the first to investigate these differences. In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he compared the accomplishments of people from different generations of prominent English families. No formal measures of intelligence existed at the time, so Galton evaluated each of his subjects on their fame as judged by encyclopedia entries, honors, awards, and similar indicators. He concluded that eminence of the kind he measured ran in families and so had a hereditary component. Believing that some human abilities derived from hereditary factors, Galton founded the eugenics movement, which sought to improve the human species through selective breeding of gifted individuals. Between 1884 and 1890 Galton operated a laboratory at the South Kensington Museum in London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) where, for a small fee, people could have themselves measured on a number of physical and psychological attributes. He tried to relate intellectual ability to skills such as reaction time, sensitivity to physical stimuli, and body proportions. For example, he measured the highest and lowest pitch a person could hear and how well a person could detect minute differences between weights, colors, smells, and other physical stimuli. Despite the crude nature of his measurements, Galton was a pioneer in the study of individual differences. His work helped develop statistical concepts and techniques still in use today. He also was the first to advance the idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured. In the 1890s American psychologist, James Cattell who worked with Galton in England, developed a battery of 50 tests that attempted to measure basic mental ability. Like Galton, Cattell focused on measurements of sensory discrimination and reaction times. Cattell's work—and by association, Galton's—was unsupported in 1901, when a study showed that the measurements had no correlation with academic achievement in college. Later researchers, however, pointed out that Cattell's test subjects were limited to Columbia University students, whose high academic performance was not representative of the general population. Better-designed tests given to broader samples have shown that reaction time and processing speed on perceptual tasks do correlate with academic achievement. In an effort to convert the Mental age Scores into a uniform index of the individual’s status, the Ratio IQ was introduced in early intelligence tests. This IQ was basically the ratio of the mental age to the chronological age multiplied by 100 in order to eliminate decimals. The mathematical representation of this would be: IQ= (mental age / Chronological age ) * 100 If a person being tested had a mental age equal to the chronological age it is said to have an I.Q. of 100, otherwise considerate to be performing at a normal level. This test, once efficient, had a technical difficulty due to the fact that the results of the test could not be compared at other age levels. Besides being incomparable with other age levels, the Mental Age IQ, otherwise known as the Ratio IQ, “proved very difficult to construct tests that meet psychometric requirements for comparability of ratio IQ through their age range. Therefore, due to this inefficiency, the Ratio IQ test has been replaced with the Deviation Test. The Deviation IQ is a standard score with a mean of 100 on a Standard Deviation that is similar to that of the Standard Deviation in the Standford-Binet IQ distribution. Although the Standard Deviation of the Stanford-Binet Ratio IQ is not exactly constant al all ages, it fluctuates around the median value slightly greater than 16. But if a Standard Deviation close to 16 were to be chosen when reporting standard scores in a newly developed test, the results of such tests can be interpreted the same way as the Standford-Binet Ratio IQ. It is important to keep in mind that the methods employed in finding traditional Ratio IQ’s are not that of the Standard Deviation IQ. These are not ratios of the mental ages and chronological ages. Another thing that we also have to keep in mind is that there are certain limitations when it comes to the Ratio IQ. Tests have shown that when a child reaches adolescence, to be mores specific, the age of 15, when he/she performs the test, there is no noticeable iq increasement. On the other hand, the deviation I.Q. can record the progress of an individual up to the time where he/she took the test. Also, this test is capable of identifying if the person has the capacity to develop more intellectually. Last but not least, it is important to notice the greatest discrepancies in both tests which is that the Ratio IQ consists of a specific group of questions, while the Deviation IQ consists of diverse subtests which range from mathematics to that of logical reasoning. These subtests will allow the tester to identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses of the individual. An intelligence test, like any other psychological test, must meet certain criteria in order to be accepted as scientific and accurate. A test must be standardized, reliable, and valid. Standardization refers to the process of defining norms of performance to which all test takers are compared. Before an intelligence test can be used to make meaningful comparisons, the test makers first give the test to a sample of the population representative of the individuals for whom the test is designed. This sample of people is called a normative sample, because it is used to establish norms (standards) of performance on the test. Normative samples usually consist of thousands of people from all areas of the country and all strata of society. Test scores of people in the sample are statistically analyzed to compile the test norms. When the test is made available for general use, these norms are used to determine a score for each person who takes the test. The IQ score or overall score reflects how well the person did compared to people of the same age in the normative sample. Reliability refers to the consistency of test scores. A reliable test yields the same or close to the same score for a person each time it is administered. In addition, alternate forms of the test should produce similar results. By these criteria, modern intelligence tests are highly reliable. In fact, intelligence tests are the most reliable of all psychological tests. Validity is the extent to which a test predicts what it is designed to predict. Intelligence tests were designed to predict school achievement, and they do that better than they do anything else. For example, IQ scores of elementary school students associate moderately with their class grades and highly with achievement test scores. IQ tests also predict well the number of years of education that a person completes. The SAT is somewhat less predictive of academic performance in college. Educators note that success in school depends on many other factors besides intelligence, including encouragement from parents and peers, interest, and motivation. Validity also refers to the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure. A valid intelligence test should measure intelligence and not some other capability. However, making a valid intelligence test is not a straightforward task because there is little consensus on a precise definition of intelligence. Lacking such a consensus, test makers usually evaluate validity by determining whether test performance correlates with performance on some other measure assumed to require intelligence, such as achievement in school. The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt test (or Bender-Gestalt test) is a psychological assessment used to evaluate visual-motor functioning, visual-perceptual skills, neurological impairment, and emotional disturbances in children and adults ages three and older. The Bender-Gestalt is used to evaluate visual-motor maturity and to screen children for developmental delays. The test is also used to assess brain damage and neurological deficits. Individuals who have suffered a traumatic brain injury may be given the Bender-Gestalt as part of a battery of neuropsychological measures, or tests. The Bender-Gestalt is sometimes used in conjunction with other personality tests to determine the presence of emotional and psychiatric disturbances such as schizophrenia. The original Bender Visual Motor Gestalt test was developed in 1938 by psychiatrist Lauretta Bender. There are several different versions of the Bender-Gestalt available today (i.e., the Bender-Gestalt test; Modified Version of the Bender-Gestalt test for Preschool and Primary School Children; the Hutt Adaptation of the Bender-Gestalt test; the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt test for Children; the Bender-Gestalt test for Young Children; the Watkins Bender-Gestalt Scoring System; the Canter Background Interference Procedure for the Bender-Gestalt test). All use the same basic test materials, but vary in their scoring and interpretation methods. The standard Bender Visual Motor Gestalt test consists of nine figures, each on its own 3 x 5 card. An examiner presents each figure to the test subject one at a time and asks the subject to copy it onto a single piece of blank paper. The only instruction given to the subject is that he or she should make the best reproduction of the figure possible. The test is not timed, although standard administration time is typically 10-20 minutes. After testing is complete, the results are scored based on accuracy and organization. Interpretation depends on the form of the test in use. Common features considered in evaluating the drawings are rotation, distortion, symmetry, and perseveration. As an example, a patient with frontal lobe injury may reproduce the same pattern over and over (perserveration) The Bender-Gestalt can also be administered in a group setting. In group testing, the figures are shown to test subjects with a slide projector, in a test booklet, or on larger versions of the individual test cards. Both the individual and group- administered Bender-Gestalt evaluation may take place in either an outpatient or hospital setting. Patients should check with their insurance plans to determine if these or other mental health services are covered. A battery of tests is when a number of specifically selected tests are employed together to predict a single criterion. In order to have a practical criterion, several tests might be administered. Most of the time, to establish these criteria the test administrator depends on a number of diverse traits. If a single test where to be administered, such test would have been heterogeneous. When it comes to analyzing such battery of tests, the problem arises when the diverse scores have to be combined in order to arrive at a decision that concerns each individual. There are two major procedures to follow when administering the test battery; these are the Multiple Regression Equation and the Profile Analysis. The Multiple Regression Equation provides the tester a predicted criterion score for each individual on the basis of his/her score on all tests in the battery. The Profile Analysis and Cutoff Scores are the procedure that involves the establishment of a minimum cutoff score on each test. When this method is used at the evaluation, anyone who falls below the minimum score, “an anyone of the appropriate test” is rejected. There are several well known Test Batteries. These are the Thematic Apperception Test, the House Tree Person, and the Bender Gestalt, also the IWA is another one of them. The TAT, or the Thematic Apperception Test represents a most highly structured stimuli and requires a more complex and meaningful organized verbal responses. The interpretation of such test is based on content analysis, and not a qualitative nature. This test consists of 19 cards containing pictures in black and white and one card blank. The person being tested is instructed to make-up a story to fit each picture describing what is happening and what led up to the events in it. He/she has to talk about feelings, what the character might be thinking and then instructed to imagine what is happening in the blank card. This is one of the most used projective tests in which the examined has to complete a tree, a house and a person. The drawing techniques used by the examined will be used to identify conflicts and concerns This is another test used when administering a battery of tests. It consists of several subtests ranging from mathematics to logical thinking. Such test has several divisions due to the cultural influence on the individual being tested, his/her age, geographical location, etc. Bibliography: Word Count: 2544
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