This accessible book outlines the key ingredients of psychological assessment and provides case studies to illustrate their application, making this an ideal textbook for courses on psychometrics or psychological assessment. The book covers the nature of assessment, basic components, how tests are made, underlying statistics, reliability and validity, assessment of intelligence, abilities and personality, non-psychometric approaches, as well as ethical and professional issues and modern developments. A final chapter explains how readers can construct their own tests. Wide-ranging case studies demonstrate the variety of contexts in which assessment is conducted. The author’s clarity of writing and use of practical examples throughout helps students apply these methods in practice with confidence as part of their studies on an array of courses.

How Assessment Measures are Made

How assessment measures are made

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

  • Understand how publishers go about designing a psychological measure.
  • Distinguish between different types of construction, including the use of criterion-keying, factor analysis, CTT, IRT and Rasch scaling.
  • Give an account of the principles of test standardization and percentile norms.
  • Explain the differences between norm-referenced, criterion-referenced and self-referenced data.

What is This Chapter about?

If you want to become a millionaire by making a test and then selling it to a publisher or becoming a test publisher yourself, you have to begin with getting your materials right. If you think what I have just written is a little sensational, then I can tell you that it has been done. To do ...

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