Assessment Process

Introduction

In solving daily life problems, we automatically execute a lot of judgement and decision making. We also gather information or consult others in order to make well-informed decisions and judgements. The assessment process in the field of psychology is about the gathering and processing of information by a professional in order to get well-informed judgements and decisions concerning a specific request made by a person or an organization. The client is either a person or an organization that made the request; the subject is the person or organization who is the target of the assessment. Psychological assessment refers to the judgements and decisions made by the professional psychologist. Assessment process refers to how these judgements and decisions came about and how these judgements and decisions are communicated to the client.

Contrary to the layperson, the professional has the obligation to process his judgements and decisions according to three sets of standards: ethical standards, social standards, and methodological standards. Ethical and social standards apply to all fields of professional psychology. It is with respect to the methodological standards that the professional gets his or her identity as an academically educated expert in a particular field. Most methodological standards in the field of assessment published in the standards of the professional organizations are related to the methods and procedures the psychologist uses in collecting information. Standards or guidelines with respect to the assessment process are not so well articulated. Actually, it is only recently that the European Association of Psychological Assessment installed a Task Force to formulate Guidelines for the Assessment Process (GAP) (Fernández-Ballesteros, 1998).

This entry contains five sections. The first section highlights the distinction between assessment and testing. The second section analyses the assessment process. The third section mentions some of the biases that may disturb the intrinsic validity of the process and mentions some remedies proposed in the literature. The fourth section points to developments in the field that try to model the assessment process. The last section pays attention to the most recent contribution to the field, which is the production of professional guidelines for the assessment process.

Assessment and Testing

The relatively late attention to the quality of the assessment process might partly be explained by the dominant position of the psychometric approach in assessment. Psychometrics is the discipline that deals with formal statistical foundations of measuring and validating individual differences. In the field of applied psychometrics this tradition focuses on two issues: the development of psychometrically sound tests and the validation of these tests with respect to external criteria. A test is psychometrically sound when it proves to be an objective, quantitative, and reliable measure of individual differences. It is psychometrically valid when its scores predict the position of the examinee on some other criterion or characteristic. In order to be accepted as a test, the instrument must be constructed and validated according to the prescriptions of the existing psychometric theories (Allen & Yen, 1979, and Nunnally, 1978, for further documentation). The psychometric tradition has proven very valuable and both test theory and testing are integrated in the academic education of assessors. Moreover, the tradition has witnessed distinguished scholars who published fine books on testing and test use (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997; Cronbach, 1990).

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