Introduction
Tests are an intrinsic part of people’s lives. They are tested as children to determine when they will enter school and how much they will learn in school. They are tested as young adults to determine whether they should receive a high school diploma, whether they should enter college, how much they can learn, or whether they can participate in some specialized training. People are tested if they seek admission to law school or medical school, if they want to practice a profession, and if they want to work for a specific company or show proficiency in a particular talent.
Tests have been used for quite some time. In China around 2000 b.c.e., public officials were examined regularly and were promoted or dismissed on the basis of these examinations. The direct historical antecedents of contemporary testing go back slightly more than one hundred years and reflect contributions made by many individuals representing four historical traditions: the French clinical tradition, the German scientific tradition, the British emphasis on individual differences, and the American practical orientation.
European Trends
The French clinical tradition emphasized clinical observation. That is, the French were very interested in the mentally ill and mentally retarded, and a number of French physicians wrote excellent descriptions of patients they had studied. They produced very perceptive and detailed descriptions, or case studies, and thereby contributed the notion that the creation of a test must be preceded by careful observations of the real world. To develop a test to measure depression, for example, one must first carefully observe many depressed patients. The French also produced the first practical test of intelligence: Alfred Binet, a well-known French psychologist, in 1905 devised the Binet-Simon test (with Théodore Simon) to be used with French schoolchildren to identify those who were retarded and hence needed specialized instruction.
A second historical trend that affected testing was the scientific approach promulgated by German scientists in the late 1800s. Perhaps the best-known name in the field was Wilhelm Wundt, who is considered to be the founder of experimental psychology. He was particularly interested in reaction time, the rapidity with which a person responds to a stimulus. To study reaction time, Wundt and his students carried out systematic experimentation in a laboratory, focused mostly on sensory functions such as vision, and developed a number of instruments to be used to study reaction time. Although Wundt was not interested in tests, his scientific approach and his focus on sensory functions did influence later test developers, who saw testing as an experiment in which standardized instructions needed to be followed and strict control over the testing procedure needed to be exercised. They even took the measurement of sensory processes such as vision to be an index of how well the brain functioned and therefore of how intelligent the person was.
Whereas the Germans were interested in discovering general laws of behavior and were trying to use reaction time as a way of investigating the intellectual processes that presumably occur in the brain, the British were more interested in looking at individual differences. The British viewed these differences not as errors, as Wundt did, but as a fundamental reflection of evolution and natural selection, the ideas that had been given a strong impetus by the work of Charles Darwin. In fact, it was Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who is said to have launched the testing movement on its course. Galton studied eminent British men and became convinced that intellectual genius was fixed by inheritance: One was born a genius rather than trained to be one. Galton developed a number of tests to measure various aspects of intellectual capacity, tested large numbers of individuals who visited his laboratory, and developed various statistical procedures to analyze the test results.
American Perspectives
It was in the United States, however, that psychological testing really became an active endeavor. In 1890, psychologist James McKeen Cattell
wrote a scientific paper that for the first time used the phrase “mental test.” In this paper, he presented a series of ten tests designed to measure a person’s intellectual level. These tests involved procedures such as the subject’s estimating a ten-second interval, and measurement of the amount of pressure exerted by the subject’s grip. Cattell had been a pupil of Wundt, and these tests reflected Wundt’s heavy emphasis on sensory abilities. The tests were administered to Columbia University students, since Cattell was a professor there, to see if the results predicted grade point average. They did not; nevertheless, the practice of testing students to predict their college performance was born.
Lewis Terman, a professor at Stanford University, took the French test that Binet had developed and created a new version in English, called the Stanford-Binet test; thus, intelligence testing became popular in America. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, there was a great need in the military to screen out recruits whose intellectual capabilities were too limited for military service, as well as a need to identify recruits who might be given specialized training or be admitted to officer training programs. Several tests were developed to meet these needs and, when the war was over, they became widely used in industry and in schools. By World War II, testing had become quite sophisticated and widespread and was again given impetus by the need to make major decisions about military personnel in a rapid and efficient manner. Thus, not only intellectual functioning but also problems of adjustment, morale, and psychopathology all stimulated interest in testing.
As with any other field of endeavor, advances in testing were also accompanied by setbacks, disputes, and criticisms. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for example, there was a rather acrimonious controversy between researchers at Iowa University and those at Stanford University over whether the intelligence quotients (IQs) of children could be increased through enriched school experiences. In the 1960s, tests were severely criticized, especially the multiple-choice items used in tests to make admission decisions in higher education. Many books were published that attacked testing, often in a distorted and emotional manner. In the 1970s, intelligence tests again came to the forefront, in a bitter controversy about whether white people are more intelligent than black people. Many school districts eliminated the administration of intelligence tests, both because the tests were seen as tools of potential discrimination and because of legal ramifications.
Tests are still criticized and misused, but they have become much more sophisticated and represent a useful set of tools that, when used appropriately, can help people make more informed decisions.
Testing Skills
In the everyday world, there are a number of decisions that must be made daily. For example, “Susan” owns a large manufacturing company and has openings for ten lathe operators. When she advertises these positions, 118 prospective employees apply. How will Susan decide which ten to hire? Clearly, she wants to hire the best of the applicants, those who will do good work, who will be responsible and come to work on time, who will follow the expected rules but also be flexible when the nature of the job changes, and so on. She would probably want to interview all the applicants, but it might be physically impossible for her to do so since it would require too much time, and perhaps she might realize that she does not have the skills to make such a decision. An alternative, then, would be to test all the applicants and to use the test information with other data, such as letters from prior employers, to make the needed decision. A test, then, can be looked on as an interview, but one that is typically more objective, since the biases of the interviewer will be held in check; more time effective, since a large number of individuals can be tested at one sitting, whereas interviews typically involve one candidate at a time; more economical, since a printed form will typically cost less than the salary of an interviewer; and, usually, more informative, since a person’s results can be compared with the results of others, whereas one’s performance in an interview is more difficult to evaluate.
In fact, historically, most tests have been developed because of pressing practical needs: the need to identify schoolchildren who might benefit from specialized instruction, the need to identify Army recruits with special talents or problems, or the need to identify high school students with particular interest in a specific field such as physics. As testing has grown, the applications of testing have also expanded. Tests are now used to provide information about achievement, intellectual capacity, potential talents, career interests, motivation, and hundreds of other human psychological concerns. Tests are also developed to serve as tools for the assessment of social or psychological theories; for example, measures of depression are of interest to social scientists investigating suicide, while measures of social support are useful in studies of adolescents and the elderly.
Testing Potential
Another way of thinking about tests is that a test represents an experiment. The experimenter, in this case usually a psychologist or someone trained in testing, administers a set of carefully specified procedures and just as carefully records the subject’s responses or performance on these procedures. Thus, a psychologist who administers an intelligence test to a schoolchild is interested not simply in computing the child’s IQ but also in observing how the child goes about solving new problems, how extensive the child’s vocabulary is, how the child reacts to frustration, the facility with which the child can solve word problems versus numerical problems, and so on. While such information could be derived by carefully observing the child in the classroom over a long period of time, using a specific test procedure not only is less time-consuming but also allows for a more precise comparison between a particular child’s performance and that of other children.
There are, then, at least two ways, not mutually exclusive, of thinking about a test. Both of these ways of thinking are the result of the various historical emphases: the French emphasis on the clinical symptoms exhibited by the individual, the German emphasis on the scientific procedure, the British interest in individual differences, and the American emphasis on practicality: “Does it work, and how fast can I get the results?”
To be sure, tests are only one source of information, and their use should be carefully guided by a variety of considerations. In fact, psychologists who use tests with clients are governed by two very detailed sets of rules. One set has to do with the technical aspects of constructing a test, with making sure that indeed a particular test has been developed according to scientific guidelines. A second set has to do with ethical standards, ensuring that the information derived from a test is to be used carefully for the benefit of the client.
Because the use of tests does not occur in a vacuum, but rather in a society that has specific values and expectations, that emphasizes or denies specific freedoms, and in which certain political points of view may be more or less popular, this use is often accompanied by strong feelings. For example, in the 1970s, Americans became very concerned about the deteriorating performance of high school seniors who were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT, later the SAT Reasoning Test) for entrance into college. From 1963 to 1977, the average score on the SAT verbal portion declined by about 50 points, and the average score on the SAT mathematics section declined by about 30 points. Rather than seeing the SAT as simply a nationwide “interview” that might yield some possibly useful information about a student’s performance at a particular point in time, the SAT had become a goal in itself, a standard by which to judge all sorts of things, including whether high school teachers were doing their jobs.
Testing Psychology
Tests play a major role in most areas of psychology, and the history of psychological testing is in fact intertwined with the history of psychology as a field. Psychology is defined as the science of behavior, and tests are crucial to the experimentation that is at the basis of that science. Especially with human subjects, studies are typically carried out by identifying some important dimension, such as intelligence, depression, concern about one’s health, or suicide ideation, and then trying to alter that dimension by some specific procedure, such as psychotherapy to decrease depression, education to increase health awareness, a medication designed to lessen hallucinations, and so on. Whether the specific procedure is effective is then assessed by the degree of change, typically measured by a test or a questionnaire.
Psychology also has many applied aspects. There are psychologists who work with the mentally ill, with drug abusers, with college students who are having personal difficulties, with spouses who are not getting along, with business executives who wish to increase their leadership abilities, or with high school students who may not be certain of what career to pursue. All these situations can involve the use of tests, to identify the current status of a person (for example, to determine how depressed the person is), to make predictions about future behavior (for example, to determine how likely it is that a person will commit suicide), to identify achievement (for example, to assess how well a person knows elementary math), or to identify strengths (for example, to gauge whether someone is a people-oriented type of person)—in other words, to get a more objective and detailed portrait of the particular client.
The wide and growing use of computers has also affected the role of tests. Tests can be administered and scored by computer, and the client can receive feedback, often with great detail, by computer. Computers also allow tests to be tailored to the individual. Suppose, for example, a test with one hundred items is designed to measure basic arithmetic knowledge in fifth-grade children. Traditionally, all one hundred items would be administered and each child’s performance scored accordingly. By using a computer, however, a test can present only selected items, with subsequent items being present or absent depending on the child’s performance on the prior item. If, for example, a child can do division problems quite well, as shown by his or her correct answers to more difficult problems, the computer can be programmed to skip the easier division problems.
Clearly, tests are here to stay. The task is to use them wisely, as useful but limited tools to benefit the individual rather than facilitate political manipulations.
Bibliography
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