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In Psychology, there are many instruments that are used for psychological testing and assessment. These instruments are important in testing one’s knowledge and experiences. Psychological tests include intelligence tests, aptitude tests, and personality tests. Aptitude tests or ability tests are tests designed to assess one’s logical reasoning or thinking performance.
They consist of multiple choice questions and are administered under examination conditions. Personality tests assess personality types and character traits. Intelligence test is also called Intelligence Quotient (I.Q test). The I.Q test is an instrument of psychological testing and assessment.
The test assesses intelligence by way of administering various standardized tests. The research paper shall focus on the intelligence test (Kathleen, 2009).
Intelligence testing (IQ testing) is generally used by psychologists to measure intelligence. Intelligence is defined as the ability of think in an abstract manner, to understand and solve problems, reason objectively, learn, and plan. Therefore, there is more to intelligence than intellectual competence (Wechsler, 1944).
Intelligence testing is important since it helps to confirm the presence of mental disabilities for purposes of diagnosing a disability. In addition, intelligence testing also provides important information on how one can approach problems and resolve issues (Kathleen, 2009).
Intelligence testing is important in schools and it also plays an important role in the current society. However, intelligence testing it has hits, misses, false positive errors, and negative errors. A hit is the strike or success achieved. On the other hand, a miss is failure to hit.
A false positive error is a type of error that occurs in statistical analysis, whereby a sample trial detects a difference in outcomes between a treatment group and a control group when in fact there is no difference. In contrast, a negative error is an error that occurs in analysis where a sample trial detects no difference in outcomes between a treatment group and a control group when in fact differences exist (Keith, 1998).
There exists several misses or critics of intelligence testing as an instrument of psychological testing and assessment. Intelligence test neglects important qualities in human like emotions, empathy, and interpersonal skills. The reason behind this is that intelligence test is not a complete assessment of cognitive psychology.
This can be demonstrated by the fact that a majority of the individuals manifest the inability to behave or think in a rational manner in spite of their adequate IQ. There are a number of traits associated with most people such as good thinking, sound judgment, and proper and decision making.
Although these are very important traits or behaviors, the intelligence test does not test them since they affect the process of planning, evaluating evidence, judging risks and probabilities, as well as making effective decisions. IQ tests ignore these skills of rational thinking yet the skills are equally important (Stanovich, 2011). Rational thinking helps people to think radically on how to achieve their set goals.
Although intelligence tests target significant issues in an individual’s thinking process, nonetheless, they have failed to examine the extent to which rational thinking has been entrenched. Rational thinking or good thinking leads to appropriate decision making and sound judgment and this helps in achieving set goals. Sadly, it is omitted in Intelligence Tests.
These tests do not take into account the non-cognitive domains of an individual’s mental health. As a result of such misses, there is a need for governments, schools, and businesses to emphasize more on the skills of rational thinking that have not been addressed by the intelligence tests (Keith, 1998).
Despite the misses, there are more hits demonstrated by Intelligence Tests. These tests can be carried out in many ways. Group intelligence is the first form of intelligence instrument. It consists of a paper test booklet and a scoring sheet.
It assesses academic areas. Group intelligence may not identify disability, but it will help to know how well one can socialize with different types of people in the group and also establishes how well one works in a group. Individual intelligence test involves tasks and test work for identifying responses through question and answer session, puzzles and also games.
These tasks are timed to show the amount of time taken to respond to questions. Computerized tests are the latest and widely used tests in psychological testing and assessment (Wechsler, 1944).
In a school set up, intelligence tests help to separate the high ability students from the low ability students. This leads to high level education being administered to the students with high capacity of thinking. The early training enables students to nurture and develop leadership skills.
Owing to the high quality of education, upon reaching adulthood, students who do well academically are morel likely to enjoy high economic statuses. Because they know the value of education, such individuals will most likely champion the course for the future of other students.
This is only achievable after carrying out an IQ test of the student in order to differentiate the high ability and low ability students. The low ability students are not neglected due to their IQ levels but this test serves to help them improve in their class work (Wechsler, 1944).
However, the isolation of the low ability students causes them to be denied the chances in the society of the high ability students. They are not exposed to high quality education which eventually leads them into societal roles in the society.
This may even lead them into being poor because of the mindset they are given that they are low in ability, when they reach adulthood. As a result, their children will suffer from their poverty levels being denied high quality education.
The result of this is a generation that is lowly motivated educationally, as the high ability students create a generation of highly motivated students (Keith, 1998). This is a miss caused by Intelligence Tests.
The military has also adopted intelligence tests to assist in the recruitment exercise. These intelligence tests identified the most suitable jobs for each individual recruit. The test enables the army personnel to get a fairly accurate, quick and cheap assessment of the general human ability.
The military discipline being a quite sensitive area, it has greatly benefited from the use of IQ tests to their recruits who are allocated areas that are most efficient for them. It has saved human resources in terms of the amount of time it would take to effectively measure extend of human ability associated to an individual (Kathleen, 2009).
Intelligence Tests are also important in identifying the gifted and talented in the society. This helps to bring up a chain of successful individuals in the society since the gifted and talented are place in high education centers and their abilities are challenged to broaden their thinking capacity hence achieving their goals in life.
For instance, if an IQ test shows that a child has some talent in math and science, those interests and talents can be developed to help the child get into a medical, research, or engineering field. This helps a society keep a steady supply of people who can provide benefits, making life better for all of their citizens (Wechsler, 1944). This is a hit of Intelligence Tests as an instrument of psychological testing and assessment.
Errors are bound to occur in the process of carrying out the IQ test. This is the difference in the observed results from the exact true value. A false positive error is bound to occur if there is a noted difference in the observed results from the exact result when actually there is no difference in the two analyses. Consequently, a difference may occur in the observed result from the actual result and the difference is not noted.
This causes a negative error. Ideally, there is a percentage error expected to occur in every standardized test, this error is the amount by which the score that is actually observed differs from a hypothetical true score (Stanovich, 2011).
Intelligence tests are helpful in many circumstances in which a comprehensive intellectual assessment is unnecessary or impractical. These tests provide objective and efficacious data.
Reference List
Kathleen, A. (2009). Online Psychology Laboratory. Washington, D.C.: News America Publications.
Stanovich, E. (2011). What Intelligence Test Miss: The Psychology of Rational hought. New York:Prentice Hall
Wechsler, D. (1944). The measurement of adult intelligence. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins
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