PS102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Lewis Terman, Psychological Testing, Stopwatch
Document Summary
A psychological test is a standard measure of a sample of a person"s behaviour. They"re measurement instruments used to determine the individual differences that exist among peoples abilities, aptitudes, interests, and personalities. Principle types of tests: mental ability tests. Psychological testing originated with efforts to measure general mental ability. There are 3 subcategories to these tests: Asses intellectual potential rather than accumulated knowledge: aptitude tests. Test components like verbal reasoning, numerical ability, spelling, etc: achievement tests. Gauge a person"s mastery and knowledge of various subjects such as reading, english, history, etc: personality tests. Measure various aspects of personality including motives, interests, values, and attitudes. Many psychologists prefer calling these tests scales because unlike tests of mental abilities the question in these tests don"t have a right/wrong answer. Both mental ability and personality tests are standardized measures of behaviour. Standardization: the uniform procedures used in the administration and scoring of a test.
