PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT I
MODULE 1: INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING AND MEASUREMENT
I. How did Psychological Assessment start?
- Historians noted that a rudimentary form of assessment existed in Ancient China as early as 2200 B.C.
- When the Chinese emperor had his officials examined in every third year to determine their fitness for the
office.
- Such testing was modified and refined over the centuries until written exams were introduced in the Han
Dynasty (202 B.C. - A.D. 200).
- Five topics were tested: civil law, military affairs, agriculture, revenue, and geography.
- In Europe, interests in physiognomy, the notion that we can judge the inner character of people from their
outward appearance especially the face can be dated to the 4 th Century.
- The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C) published a short treatise based on the premise that the
soul and the body “sympathize” with each other.
- Physiognomy is an attempt to infer the personality characteristics of a person from his individual
appearance.
- Physiognomy laid the foundation for a more specialized form of quackery known as phrenology.
Phrenology - which means reading bumps on the head.
- The founding of phrenology is usually ascribed to the German Physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758 - 1828).
- Gall argued that the brain is the organ of sentiments and faculties and that these capacities are localized and
because the skull conforms to the shape of the brain, a cranial “bump” would signify an enlargement of the
underlying faculty.
- Thus, based on these plausible (but incorrect) assumptions, Gall and his followers were able to decide if an
individual was amorous, secretive, hopeful, combative, benevolent, self - confident, happy, imitative - in
all, dozens of traits were discerned from cranial bumps.
- In Great Britain, Sir Francis Galton (1822 - 1911) attempted to measure intellect by means of reaction
time and sensory discrimination.
- He wrote a book entitled “Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development” (1883).
- This was a series of essays that emphasized individual differences in mental faculties.
- Due to his efforts in devising practicable measures of individual differences, historians of psychological
testing often regard Galton as the Father of Mental Testing.
- In 1905, French Psychologist Alfred Binet invented the first modern intelligence test.
- In 1904, the Minister of Public Instruction in Paris appointed a commission to decide on the educational
measures that should be used to identify those children who could not learn by the ordinary methods.
- It was determined that these children should be removed from their regular classes and given special
instructions suitable to their more limited intellectual prowess.
- This was the beginning of the Special Education Classroom.
- It was evident that a means of selecting children for such special placement was needed, and Binet and his
colleague Simon were called to develop a practical tool for just this purpose.
- Thus arose the first formal scale for assessing the intelligence of children
- The 30 tests on the 190 scale ranged from utterly simple sensory tests to quite complex verbal abstractions.
MODULE 1: INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING AND MEASUREMENT
I. How did Psychological Assessment start?
- Historians noted that a rudimentary form of assessment existed in Ancient China as early as 2200 B.C.
- When the Chinese emperor had his officials examined in every third year to determine their fitness for the
office.
- Such testing was modified and refined over the centuries until written exams were introduced in the Han
Dynasty (202 B.C. - A.D. 200).
- Five topics were tested: civil law, military affairs, agriculture, revenue, and geography.
- In Europe, interests in physiognomy, the notion that we can judge the inner character of people from their
outward appearance especially the face can be dated to the 4 th Century.
- The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C) published a short treatise based on the premise that the
soul and the body “sympathize” with each other.
- Physiognomy is an attempt to infer the personality characteristics of a person from his individual
appearance.
- Physiognomy laid the foundation for a more specialized form of quackery known as phrenology.
Phrenology - which means reading bumps on the head.
- The founding of phrenology is usually ascribed to the German Physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758 - 1828).
- Gall argued that the brain is the organ of sentiments and faculties and that these capacities are localized and
because the skull conforms to the shape of the brain, a cranial “bump” would signify an enlargement of the
underlying faculty.
- Thus, based on these plausible (but incorrect) assumptions, Gall and his followers were able to decide if an
individual was amorous, secretive, hopeful, combative, benevolent, self - confident, happy, imitative - in
all, dozens of traits were discerned from cranial bumps.
- In Great Britain, Sir Francis Galton (1822 - 1911) attempted to measure intellect by means of reaction
time and sensory discrimination.
- He wrote a book entitled “Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development” (1883).
- This was a series of essays that emphasized individual differences in mental faculties.
- Due to his efforts in devising practicable measures of individual differences, historians of psychological
testing often regard Galton as the Father of Mental Testing.
- In 1905, French Psychologist Alfred Binet invented the first modern intelligence test.
- In 1904, the Minister of Public Instruction in Paris appointed a commission to decide on the educational
measures that should be used to identify those children who could not learn by the ordinary methods.
- It was determined that these children should be removed from their regular classes and given special
instructions suitable to their more limited intellectual prowess.
- This was the beginning of the Special Education Classroom.
- It was evident that a means of selecting children for such special placement was needed, and Binet and his
colleague Simon were called to develop a practical tool for just this purpose.
- Thus arose the first formal scale for assessing the intelligence of children
- The 30 tests on the 190 scale ranged from utterly simple sensory tests to quite complex verbal abstractions.
