Unit 09 psychological testing

Course Code: 840
Educational Psychology
UNIT-9
PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING

Definition of testing
 A test is used to examine someone’s
knowledge of something to determine what
that person knows or has learned.
 It measures the level of skill or knowledge that
has been reached.
 A test refers to a tool, technique or a method that
is intended to measure students knowledge or
their ability to complete a particular task.
 What Do Tests Show?
 Tests enable institutions to make better decisions
when judging, classifying and selecting people.

Test measures…
Some of the things which a test can measure
are:
 Students' ability to learn
 Recall of the subject matter (superficial
understanding)
 Depth of understanding of a subject
 Ability to apply what has been learnt
 Long-term use of the subject matter

PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS
 Psychological tests are written, visual, or verbal
evaluations administered to assess the cognitive
and emotional functioning of children and adults.
Psychological tests are used to assess many areas,
including:
 Traits such as introversion and extroversion
 Certain conditions such as depression and
anxiety
 Intelligence, aptitude and achievement such as
verbal intelligence and reading achievement

CONT…
 Attitudes and feelings such as how
individuals feel about the treatment that
they received from their therapists
 Interests such as the careers and
activities that a person is interested in
 Specific abilities, knowledge or
skills such as cognitive ability, memory
and problem-solving skills.

Purpose
 Psychological tests are used to assess a variety of
mental abilities and attributes, including
achievement and ability, personality, and
neurological functioning.
 For children, academic achievement, ability,
and intelligence tests may be used as tools in
school placement, in determining the presence of a
learning disability or a developmental delay , in
identifying giftedness, or in tracking intellectual
development.
 Intelligence testing may also be used with teens
and young adults to determine vocational ability
(e.g., in career counseling).

APTITUDE TESTS
 An aptitude test is an assessment used to
determine a candidate's cognitive ability or
personality.
 Aptitude tests (sometimes referred to as cognitive
ability tests) are ability tests designed to assess
your logical reasoning or mental ability.
 Aptitude tests measure abilities such as numerical
reasoning, verbal reasoning, diagrammatic
reasoning or mechanical reasoning.
 They're extremely common in job assessments as
they can be used to predict the likelihood of a
candidate's success in a job role, whilst eliminating
any bias through its standardised administration.

PERSONALITY TESTS
 A personality test is a tool used to assess
human personality.
 Personality testing and assessment refer to
techniques designed to measure the
characteristic patterns of traits that people
exhibit across various situations.

SUBJECTIVE METHOD
The Subjective Methods are those in which the
individual is permitted to disclose what he knows about
himself as an object of observation.
 They are based on what the subject himself has to
say about his traits, attitudes, personal experiences,
aims, needs and interests.
Some of the important subjective methods are:
 (1) The autobiography,
 (2) The case history,
 (3) The interview,
 (4) The questionnaire or the inventory.

1. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
 The autobiography is a narration by the individual,
given either freely or according to certain subject
headings provided by the examiner, of his
experiences throughout life, of his present aims,
purposes, interests and attitudes.
 The subject has freedom in selecting experiences
which are of significance to him and these reveal
his personality.
 The disadvantage is that what the subjects out of
his life is that part of his experience which he is
willing to reveal.

2. The Case History
 The case history is dependent to a great or less
extent upon the autobiography.
 In a case history, we integrate the information that
we obtain from various sources about the
individual.
 This requires many interviews with individual and
other persons who know the individual.
 The case-study technique gives information about
the individual’s parents and grand-parents, his
home background, his medical history, his
educational career, his friendships, his marital life,
his profession and others.

3. The Interview
 The interview is the most common method of judging
personality.
 The interviewer questions or lets the individual speak
freely so as to get a clear picture of the individual.
 From what he says, the interviewer knows about his
interests, problems, assets and limitations.
 The chief dimension in respect to which the interview may
vary is the rigidity or flexibility with which the interviewer
holds to a pre-decided outline or schedule of questions or
topics.

 The interviewer evaluates personality traits
not only from the content of answers to
questions asked, by the interest shown, by
vocabulary or incidental references which the
subject employs unwittingly in his
conversation, and by observing his
hesitations, his fidgeting, his emotionality and
the like.
 The limitation of the method is that it is
subjective and is less valid than one believes
it to be.

4. Questionnaires
 Questionnaires are a series of printed or written
questions which the individual is supposed to answer.
 Ordinarily, the subject is expected to answer each
question by checking or encircling or underlining ‘yes’
or ‘no’ provided against the question.
 The investigator counts the number of yes’s, No’s and
?’s and thus is in a position to state whether a certain
individual possesses certain traits or not.
 The limitation of this device is that the subject may
not be willing to reveal correct facts about himself or
may not be in conscious possession of these facts.
The method, at its best, reveals that part of
personality which is explicit or available to the
subject’s scrutiny.

THE OBJECTIVE METHODS
 The Objective Methods do not depend on the subject’s own
statements about himself but on his overt behaviour as
revealed to others who serve as observers, examiners or
judges.
 The subject, as far as possible, is observed or studied in
certain life situations where his particular traits, habits, needs
and other characteristics are brought into play and can thus
be observed directly by the examiner.
Some of the objective methods are
 miniature life situations,
 unobserved observation,
 physiological measures and
 rating scales.

1. In miniature life situations
 In miniature life situations, artificial situations resembling
real life situations, are created and the subject’s reactions
and behaviour are observed and evaluated.
 Situations involving honesty, cooperation, persistence, and
team-work can be created and the subject’s behaviour may
be noted and judged accordingly.
2. The method of unobserved observation
 The method of unobserved observation is quite popular in
child development centres of guidance clinics.

 The individual is asked to perform some task or is left
himself and his behaviour is observed through a one-
way mirror, screen or other device and he is overheard
by a concealed microphone setup.
 Or the subject is observed by more than one person
and the observations are pooled together.
 Of course, before observation is started, certain
decisions must be arrived as to what to observe.
 One great case that is to be taken in this method is the
distinction between what is observed and what is
interpreted.

3. In rating scales:
 In rating scales we rate an individual of the
possession or absence of certain traits on a
certain scale.
 The individual is given a place on the scale or a
score which indicates the degree to which a
person possesses a given behaviour trait.
 The chief limitation of the rating scale lies in the
fact that our raters should be well-trained and
should have a definite knowledge of the variables.
 Often, the raters commit a mistake in that they
assign estimates that cluster around the average
point, if at all, towards the favourable direction of
the scale.

PROJECTIVE TESTS
 Projective tests are a group of personality tests that
work by allowing the person who takes the test to
illustrate aspects of their personality through taking
the test, whereas Objective tests are self-report
questionnaires.
 The term “projective” in projective tests refers to the
tendency for people to filter their interpretations of
the world through their own psychology.
 During this type of testing, a series of ambiguous
cards is shown to the person being tested, who then
is encouraged to project his feelings, impulses, and
desires onto the cards—by telling a story,
interpreting an image, or completing a sentence.

The projective techniques have in
common the following features
 The stimulus material is generally neutral,
ambiguous or more or less undefined so that the
subject can easily leave an impression of his
personality on it.
 The psychological reality, rather than the actual
reality of the subjects world is important – his
wishes, his attitudes, beliefs, ideals, conflicts and
fantasies.
 Implicit or unconscious aspects of the personality
are revealed in these techniques – and psycho-
dynamic principles, therefore, play an important
part in the interpretations.

 An untrained interpreter is likely to project his own
biases and fantasies into his interpretations of the
subject’s productions.
 Some of the important projective techniques are
the
 Rorschach Test,
 the TAT or the Thematic Apperception Test,
 the Sentence Completion Tests,
 the play techniques,
 the word-association method or
 the picture association method.

RORSCHACH INK BLOT TEST
 Developed by a Swiss psychologist Herman
Rorschach (1921), consists of 10 inkblots having
symmetrical designs.
 Five of these cards are in black and white, two with
splashes of red and three in other colours. The test
is usually administrated individually.
 When the card is shown or placed before the client
he is asked to tell what he sees in the inkblot or
what it means to him or what this might be.
 In the second phase, called the enquiry the
examiner ascertains more fully not only what the
person sees, but also what and how he sees it.

 The scoring categories of the test such as
movement and colour, are interpreted as
signifying different functions of the personality
intellectual creativity, outgoing emotionality,
practical mindedness and the like.
 From norms based on work with subjects in
various well- characterised groups, normal
individuals, neurotics, and psychotics – the
pattern of the subject’s scores may be
interpreted as belonging to one or another
personality make-up.

TAT- THEMATIC APPRECIATION
TEST
 (TAT) developed by Murray and Morgan (1935) consists of a
series of 20 pictures.
 The person is asked to tell the story that each one suggests to
him.
 These pictures are arranged in appropriate groups for male and
female adults and for children.
 On each picture, the subject tells the story by identifying the
characters, explaining their relationships to each other,
describing what preceded the situation shown in the picture,
and stating an outcome.
 The record of story is analysed according to major theories –
the hero, vocational ambitions, family conflicts and social status
etc.
 The recurrence of a given topic or the theme is to be noted

 These theme projects implicit attitudes, habits
of thought, ideals and drives of the subject, as
well as the characteristics of the other
characters- father, mother, brother, sister,
husband and wife.
 The Rorschach Test throws light on the
structures of personality whereas the TAT
throws light on the functioning of personality.

CHILDREN APPERCEPTION TEST -
CAT
 The Children's Apperception Test (C.A.T.) is
a projective measure for acquiring information
about children's personality and
psychological processes.
 The test, in general, includes a series of 10
ambiguous pictures to which the child is
asked to create a story.

PLAY TECHNIQUE
 Play techniques are more applicable to
children than to adults.
 The subject is allowed or encouraged to
construct scenes by using dolls, toys, blocks
and other building materials.
 This technique has both diagnostic and
therapeutic value and is frequently used in
Child guidance clinics.

WORD ASSOCIATION TEST
 Another commonly used technique is the word-
association method in which the subject is
presented with a list of words, one at a time,
with the instruction to respond with the first
word that enters his mind.
 The examiner notes the time required for giving
each response and the responses themselves.
 Departures from the average amount of time
and the content of unusual responses help us
to identify certain attitudes, anxieties or
sentiments.

INCOMPLETE SENTENCE
TECHNIQUE
 The incomplete sentence technique given by
Rotter, Stein and many others is a type of paper-
and-pencil personality inventory which has features
of an association test as well as of a projective
technique.
 The subject is represented with a number of
incomplete sentences which he finishes in any way
that he likes.
 The examiner tries to see the total pattern of
attitudes and feelings revealed in the series of
responses and uses it as part of the total study of
the individual.

Main Characteristics of a Good
Psychological Test
 Five main characteristics of a good psychological
test are as follows:
 1. Objectivity
 2. Reliability
 3. Validity
 4. Norms
 5. Practicability
1. Objectivity:
 The test should be free from subjective—judgement
regarding the ability, skill, knowledge, trait or
potentiality to be measured and evaluated.

Cont…
 2. Reliability:
 This refers to the extent to which they obtained
results are consistent or reliable.
 When the test is administered on the same
sample for more than once with a reasonable
gap of time, a reliable test will yield same
scores.
 It means the test is trustworthy.

Cont…
 3. Validity:
 It refers to extent to which the test measures
what it intends to measure.
 For example, when an intelligent test is
developed to assess the level of intelligence, it
should assess the intelligence of the person,
not other factors.
 Validity explains us whether the test fulfills the
objective of its development.

Cont…
 4. NORM
 Norms refer to the average performance of a
representative sample on a given test.
 It gives a picture of average standard of a
particular sample in a particular aspect.
 Norms are the standard scores, developed by
the person who develops test.
 The future users of the test can compare their
scores with norms to know the level of their
sample.

Cont…
 5. Practicability
 The test must be practicable in- time required
for completion, the length, number of items or
questions, scoring, etc.
 The test should not be too lengthy and difficult
to answer as well as scoring.

Unit 09 psychological testing

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