Current practice for assessing children and adolescents rely on objectively scored deficit-based models and/or informal assessments to determine how maladaptive behaviors affect performance. Social-emotional assessment instruments are used in schools and typically provide information related to behavioral and emotional deficits, but provide little…

School psychologists can play a unique role in schools because of their assessment expertise. Traditionally, they have been most involved in individual psychoeducational assessment for classification and labeling purposes, but the limitations of this form of assessment for building intervention strategies has led many school psychologists to…

The findings of the following four recent surveys on clinical test use in the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, and Hong Kong are reviewed: (1) "Clinical Psychological Test Usage in Japan: A Comparative Study with a Survey in the U.S.A." (T. Ogawa and C. Piotrowski, 1992); (2) "Patterns of Psychological Test Use in Hong…

The Barnum Effect was generated to teach students about the ethics of deception in research and the feelings of subjects who are deceived. The Barnum Effect occurs when individuals are duped into believing invalid results of psychological tests. People are most accepting when given favorable feedback about themselves. They interpret evaluations as…

The advent of computers in educational and psychological measurement has lead to the need for algorithms for optimal assembly of tests from item banks. This paper reviews the literature on optimal test assembly and introduces the contributions to this report on the topic. Four different approaches to computerized test assembly are discussed:…

The concurrent validity and discriminant validity of 3 widely used measures of psychological functioning were evaluated using a large, heterogeneous sample of 188 male and 337 female adult community residents (aged 16-66 years) seeking counseling services at a midwestern university training clinic. Validity was assessed as the relationship between…

The 34 tests described in this bibliography include measures of learning modalities, learning styles, and attitudes toward learning. Some are self-evaluations while others are checklists completed by teachers. All ages are represented. This document is one in a series of topical bibliographies from the Test Collection (TC) at Educational Testing…

The handbook reviews the history and current state of the art of special education for exceptional bilingual students and provides approaches for development of programs. Ties between bilingual and exceptional education are traced historically; then legislation to assure equal opportunity is reviewed. Definitions, characteristics, and special…

A preliminary study examined the interrater reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity of the Haak Sentence Completion (in which the respondent is given a sentence stem and asked to provide the remainder of the sentence) using a three-point scoring system. The subjects were 100 boys ranging in age from 6 to 11 years who were randomly…

Validation and cross-validation studies were conducted using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and Inwald Personality Inventory (IPI) to predict job performance for 698 urban male police officers who completed a six-month training academy. Job performance criteria evaluated included absence, lateness, derelictions, negative…

The fields of social and cognitive psychology and political science have offered several experimental designs for assessing the presence, type, and complexity of scripts (memory structures used to encode knowledge of an action) or event schemata. Script measurement is a potentially valuable tool for the study of information and news processing…

To supplement previous reliability and validity studies concerning the Noncognitive Questionnaire (NCQ), new NCQ items were written and assessed in relation to the original eight NCQ scales. The NCQ measures eight non-traditional or non-cognitive variables that relate to minority student retention--positive self-concept, realistic self-appraisal,…

The complex nature of the psychological construct called judgment, the history of its identification as a mental ability, its measurement, and its relationship to other mental abilities are discussed. Factor analytic research which isolated the judgment factor is reviewed. The pervasiveness of the judgment factor throughout a number of diverse…

This publication is designed to help vocational evaluators wisely select and use tests within the context of the referral questions and the individualized evaluation plan. The first of two parts contains information on why tests are used in evaluation, problems with tests, and how to select tests. Part 2 contains a review of specific tests that…

Specific suggestions and guidelines are presented for modifying psychological tests so that they can be used to obtain results that are not distorted by the individual's handicap. Focus is on testing persons with sight, hearing, and academic problems with the indication that principles developed for this fairly high percentage of the severely…