Learning Objectives

After completing your study of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Define what a psychological test is, and understand that psychological tests extend beyond personality and intelligence tests.
• Trace the history of psychological testing from Alfred Binet and intelligence testing to the tests of today.
• Describe the ways in which psychological tests can be similar to and different from one another.
• Describe the three characteristics that are common to all psychological tests, and understand that psychological tests can demonstrate these characteristics to various degrees.
• Describe the assumptions that must be made when using psychological tests.
• Describe the different ways that psychological tests can be classified.
• Describe the differences among four commonly used terms that students often con­fuse: psychological assessment, psychological tests, psychological measurement, and surveys.
• Identify and locate print and online resources that are available for obtaining information about psychological tests.

Chapter Summary

By now, we hope you understand that psychological testing extends well beyond the use of intelligence and personality tests. A measurement tool or technique that requires a person to perform one or more behaviors to make inferences about human attributes, traits, or characteristics or predict future outcomes can be considered a psychological test. The quizzes and exams you take in class are psychological tests. The written and road portions of driving exams are psychological tests. Even the structured job interviews you have participated in, or will participate in as you conduct your job search, qualify as psychological tests.

Psychological tests have various similarities and many differences. All psychological tests require an individual to perform one or more behaviors, and these behaviors are used to measure some personal attribute, trait, or characteristic thought to be important in describing or understanding behavior or to predict an outcome. However, psychological tests can and do differ in terms of the behaviors they require individuals to perform, the attributes they measure, their content, how they are administered and formatted, how they are scored and interpreted, and their psychometric quality.

Although the use of psychological tests can be traced to ancient China, most scholars agree that the advent of formal psychological testing did not begin until Binet published the first test of intelligence in 1905. Today, psychological testing is a big business, with tens of thousands of commercially available, standardized psychological tests as well as thousands of unpublished tests.

All good tests have three defining characteristics in common. First, they include a representative sample of behaviors. Second, they collect the sample under standardized conditions. Third, they have rules for scoring. When using psychological tests, we must make some assumptions. We must assume that a test measures what it says it measures, that any inferences that are drawn about test takers from their scores on the test are appropriate, that an individual’s behavior (and therefore test scores) will remain stable over time, that individuals understand test items similarly, that individuals can and will report accurately about their thoughts and feelings, and that the test score an individual receives is equal to his or her true behavior or ability in the real world plus some error.

Testing professionals refer to psychological tests in various ways. Sometimes they refer to them as tests of maximal performance, behavior observations, or self-reports. Sometimes they refer to them as standardized or nonstandardized. Other times they refer to them as objective or projective. Professionals also refer to tests based on the dimensions they measure.

It is important to remember the distinctions among four commonly misunderstood terms: psychological assessment, psychological test, measurement, and survey. First, although both psychological assessments and psychological tests are used to gather information, a psychological test is only one of many tools in the psychological assessment process. Second, a psychological test can be considered to be a measurement when the sampled behavior can be expressed in a derived score. Third, psychological tests are different from surveys in that psychological tests focus on individual differences and often report one overall derived score (or scaled scores), and surveys focus on group similarities and typically report results at the question or item level.

Last, but not least, a number of resources are available, in print and online, to locate information about published and unpublished psychological tests and measures. The Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print are two of the most popular references for learning more about available tests.