HISTORICAL, CULTURAL AND LEGAL/ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
 

A Historical Perspective
 

Assessment and even testing goes all the way back to antiquity.

Chinese and in early Greco-Roman history before Christ.

Middle Ages - witches

Nineteenth century - influence of Darwin - human traits and inheritance and the need to measure to what extent traits existed in people to see if in fact they were inherited.
 

Wundt - looking for things are common to all humans.

James McKeon Cattell, who was an American who studied with Wundt but then came back to America and did much for the testing movement and for the study of individual differences.
 

Binet-Simon tests, first of all in 1905.

Lewis Terman at Stanford - Stanford-Binet.

David Wechsler - intelligence scale for adults.
 

WWI, they needed to separate people who could function in the army from those who couldn't, and you get the first group intelligence testing. This was the Army Alpha and Army Beta. The difference between the two was the alpha required somebody to know how to read and the beta was for the illiterate.
 

World War I also brought with it the need to test personality for screening purposes. Even from the beginning, a large number of personality tests are self-report tests which have both their advantages and their disadvantages. In trying to get away from self-report we moved into the area that is known as "projective" testing. Here, we're talking about people like Rorschach and Henry Murray (who invented the TAT).
 

Culture and Assessment.
 

language.

content.

non-verbal communication

standards of evaluation. If the test developers come from a particular culture and evaluate according to the norms and mores of that culture -- for example, with regard to masculinity and femininity -- how widely can this be generalized to other cultures where the norms might be different?
 
 
 
 
 

Legal and Ethical Considerations
 

nature vs. nurture.

The Family Education Rights & Privacy Act

"Truth In Testing" laws

APA guidelines for development, administration and scoring and interpretation of tests.

three levels of tests

testing of people with disabilities
 

The Rights of Test Takers
 

There are five basic rights of test takers.

Right of Informed Consent to testing.
 

Right To Be Informed of Test Findings.
 

Right Not to Have Privacy Invaded.
 

Right To the Least Stigmatizing Label.
 

Right to Have Findings Held Confidential.
 
 
 

Psychological Tests in the Courtroom
 

This is not just in forensic cases, but also in employment, child custody, and even as experts debating whether a test is appropriate for a particular population or not.