In educational and psychological assessments, attending to item response process can be useful in understanding and improving the validity of measurement. This dissertation consists of three studies each of which proposes and applies item response theory (IRT) methods for modeling and understanding cognitive/psychological response process in…

Clinical cognitive ability assessment--and its corollary, score interpretation--are in a state of disarray. Many current instruments are designed to provide a bevy of scores to appeal to a variety of school psychologists. These scores are not all grounded in the attribute's theory or developed from sound measurement or psychometric theory. Thus,…

An old issue in psychological assessment is to what extent power and speed each are measured by a given intelligence test. Starting from accuracy and response time data, an approach based on posterior time limits (cut-offs of recorded response time) leads to three kinds of recoded data: time data (whether or not the response precedes the cut-off),…

Supplementary methods for the analysis of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status are made available, including (a) quantifying the number of abnormally low Index scores and abnormally large differences exhibited by a case and accompanying this with estimates of the percentages of the normative population expected to…

Objective: To study the effect of administration sequence on Conner's continuous performance test (CPT-II) scores in clients requesting psychological assessment. It was hypothesized that when administered at the end rather than beginning of a test battery, the test scores will show higher symptom severity. If present, order effects may cause the…

This study investigated the possibility that apparent sex differences in IQ are at least partly created by the degree of sample restriction from the baseline population. We used a nationally representative sample, the 1970 British Cohort Study. Sample sizes varied from 6518 to 11,389 between data-collection sweeps. Principal components analysis of…

The repeated psychological assessment of 41 high-risk infants during the first 2 years of life using the Mental Scale of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development was investigated. Analyses indicated that the infants' cognitive functioning remained fairly stable over the 2 years, particularly from age 6 months on. (Author/JDD)

In order to extend the multicultural horizons of neuropsychological assessment in the Chinese mainland, a battery of eight commonly used neurocognitive tests assessing motor speed, verbal and visual-spatial memory, language fluency, attention, and executive functioning were given to 224 Mandarin-speaking school children (107 boys and 117 girls)…

Experiments were carried out to determine (1) the degree of agreement with which subjects identify paragraph boundaries in unindented prose passages, (2) if a significant proportion of cues to paragraph structure are formal in nature, (3) if the identification of paragraphs in different kinds of prose differentially depends on semantic (as…

The specificity doctrine, holds that psychometric tests measure nothing other than the specific bits of knowledge and learned skills reflected in the item content of the tests. This prevailing doctrine has influenced the interpretation of test scores and the conceptualization of test validity, as well as the practical use of tests in educational…

THE COGNITIVE AND PSYCHO-SOCIAL FUNCTIONING OF FOUR CATEGORIES OF GIFTED CHILDREN WAS STUDIED. TWO GROUPS OF ADOLESCENTS SHOWING DIFFERENT TYPES OF COGNITIVE EXCELLENCE (INTELLIGENCE AND CREATIVITY) AND TWO GROUPS EXHIBITING DIFFERENT TYPES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL EXCELLENCE (MORALITY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ADJUSTMENT) WERE INVESTIGATED USING A WIDE VARIETY OF…

Evaluation of patients on the Cognitive Status Examination (CSE) significantly discriminated the brain-damaged from the psychiatric and medical groups. Examined the relationship of scores to age and education, as well as the effect of demographics on group discrimination. Presents a distribution of cutting scores for screening purposes. (Author/KS)

This 126-item test, the Learning Style Profile, was designed to assess 23 scales involving learners' cognitive skills, as well as emotional and environmental study preferences such as noise and temperature. It contains both verbal and pictorial items. The test was designed for sixth- through twelfth-grade students and has a readability level…

The mathematical and philosophical origins of "analogy" are described and their influence on the thinking of intelligence theorists is traced. Theories of intelligence and cognition bearing on analogical reasoning are examined, specifically those of Spearman, Thorndike, Guilford and Piaget. The analogy test item is shown to be a paradigm…