Psychological Testing

Psychometrics is a statistics section that deals with the measurement of human psychological variables, such as intellectual capacity, and personality traits and behaviors. Psychometricians carry out scientifically valid assessments of various behaviors. They use a specialized set of statistical tools and create the tests in order to understand better how the mind functions. Assessment of language development, early literacy and such disorders as aphasia, autism, etc., are of particular interest to speech-language pathologists.
A standardized test is also called a ''structured'' test due to its defined structure and rules. Every expert who administers the test has to follow the same structure. Standardized tests also have defined procedures for results evaluation, which are typically performed by matching the subject's score to the sample scores of people of similar age, sex, etc. This type of tests involves gathering data from a large amount of subjects via a set of defined rules for administration and scoring. Researchers determine the average score and the standard deviation based on the data.
Unlike the standardized tests, the non-standardized ones do not use data from a sample administered to a large amount of subjects with the help of the same techniques used by each researcher. Each clinician who wants to assess specific clients can create non-standardized tests individually or adapt them from existing tests. Non-standardized tests may create many problems if administration procedures and scoring rules are based on the clinician's own criteria rather than on scientifically supported basis. In some cases, there are no standardized assessments, so psychometricians must create non-standardized tests. This type of assessment is less valid than a standardized one but it possesses a high flexibility that allows a clinician to collect data, which would have been missed during the standardized test.
This material was prepared by Jaime Bradley, who is a concept map writing services writer.