362: Psychological Testing
Course Description
This course provides an overview of the development and nature of psychological tests with applications to school counseling, business, and clinical practice. The purpose of the course is to provide students with an understanding of the principles of measurement as applied to group standardized measures of achievement, special aptitude, intelligence, personality, interests and distress for use in counseling. Format will consist primarily of lectures along with group participation activities.
Course Objectives:
- To acquaint you with the fundamental vocabulary and logic of psychological measurement and behavioral assessment.
- To develop your capacity for critical judgment of the adequacy of measures purported to assess behavior in the role of theory development.
- To acquaint you with some of the relevant literature in personality assessment, psychometric theory and practice, and methods of observing and measuring behavior.
- To instill in you an appreciation of and an interest in the principles and methods of psychometric theory in general and behavior assessment in particular.
- This course is not designed to make you into an accomplished psychometrist (one who gives tests) nor is it designed to make you a skilled psychometrician (one who constructs tests), nor will it give you “hands on” experience with psychometric computer programs. Rather it is aimed to allow you to understand the fundamental theoretical issues concerning both the psychometrist and the psychometrician.
- Because modern psychometrics and statistics may be done using open source software such as R, examples will be presented in R.
Materials
Texts
Required
[1] A. Anastasi and A. Urbina. Psychological testing. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1997. ISBN: 0-02-303020-8.
How to use the required text:
The text (Anastasi and Urbina 1997) is intended to supplement the lectures. The lectures don’t follow the order of chapters in the text and the text covers some material that won’t be covered in the lectures, i.e., not all the information in each chapter is perfectly pertinent to the course requirements.
Course Assignments
Grading Policy
Typically, an A- is defined as 90% of the highest point total in the class, B- as 80% of that total, C- as 70 and D- as 60%. I may shift these values down to provide a better fit to the actual point distribution. By scaling to a percentage of the highest point total in the class, each student has a much better chance of receiving higher grades than if no re-scaling were done. This curve can only help your grade.
The full table is provided below:
| Letter | Cutoff |
|---|---|
| A | 0.95 |
| A- | 0.90 |
| B+ | 0.87 |
| B | 0.83 |
| B- | 0.80 |
| C+ | 0.77 |
| C | 0.73 |
| C- | 0.70 |
| D+ | 0.67 |
| D | 0.63 |
| D- | 0.60 |
Curve Projections
Unsurprisingly, students have many questions about the curve in this class. For tests and other assignments, I try to provide a projected letter grade. This projected letter grade is there to give you a sense of what your score would be if I implemented the class curve on this particular assignment. It is a projection. It is not a guarantee. These projected letter grades are not incorporated into your final grade. Trust me, you do not want me to curve by assignment.
Quizzes
There will be 6 quizzes in this course. These will be approximately every three weeks. The best 5 out of 6 quiz grades will be used to determine your total quiz grade. You can drop 1 of the quizzes for any reason.
Take Home Assignments
There are four large take-home assignments. Two are qualitative and two are quantitative.
I will provide more specific written guidelines at least two weeks before each assignment is due. You have to submit assignment 1 because I give extensive feedback that will help you on later assignments. However, you may skip assignment 2 or 3.
Engagement Activities
There will be multiple engagement activities in this course. These activities will allow you engage with the material for each module. Details about the specific activities will be provided on canvas. Students must complete two activities per module.