Psychological Testing in Education: Purpose and Best Practices

Introduction to Psychological Testing in Schools

Teachers must test. It is one method of evaluating progress and determining individual student needs. More than 250 million standardized tests are administered each year to 44 million students attending American elementary and secondary schools (Ysseldyke et al., 1992). Testing is only part of the broader conception of assessment. Testing involves the sampling of student behavior in order to obtain scores — quantitative indexes — or relative standing. In addition, teachers and other school personnel assess or collect data through classroom observations and interviews with students' family members or caregivers.

Psychological and psychoeducational tests are used in schools to help identify the types, bases, and extent of a student's learning difficulty or school adjustment problem. The assessment is then used to make decisions about students. At a curricular level, tests help determine the effectiveness of a particular instructional intervention. Teachers give tests before and after instituting a new teaching method or material and examine the resulting gains in student achievement. Testing can also be used to screen students and identify those with potential problems, or those who may need remediation in areas such as academic achievement, perceptual-motor functioning, and learning aptitude. Students can then be placed in appropriate programs or, if needed, in a special classroom or school.

In other words, psychological tests are not necessarily to be given to all students, but rather to those students when a teacher suspects that there may be a difficulty which could impede the student's progress in the normal classroom.

However, it is very important that teachers and other practitioners who test students have a solid basic knowledge of not only the test itself, but of testing procedure and, more importantly, how to interpret the test results. According to Overton (1992), the "use of standardized instruments requires knowledge of test-selection criteria, basic principles of measurement, administration techniques, scoring ability and careful interpretation of test results." Since a student's future is at stake, it is extremely important that testing be carried out by someone properly trained both to administer the tests and to interpret the results.

Types of Tests Used in Education

A variety of test types is used in education, including, but not limited to: learning aptitude tests; group or individual achievement tests; tests of specific skills thought to be foundational to school learning (e.g., visual-motor integration skills, speech and language tests, vision and hearing tests); personality inventories; behavioral observations; and projective techniques. Ford-Martin defines psychological tests as "written, visual or verbal evaluations administered to assess the cognitive and emotional functioning of children and adults." She explains that psychological tests are used to assess a variety of mental abilities and attributes, including achievement and ability, personality, and neurological functioning.

The different types of tests used in education include the following:

Achievement and ability tests — measures of intellectual functioning and cognitive ability, such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales.

Personality tests and inventories — evaluations of the thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and behavioral traits that comprise personality, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2).

Projective personality assessments — instruments such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

Validity, Reliability, and Norm-Referenced Assessment

Many of the instruments used in schools are norm-referenced — that is, a pupil's performance is evaluated in reference to the performance of other pupils of the same age and/or grade level. One way in which meaning is attached to a test score is to indicate how far along the normal developmental path the individual has progressed. If, for example, we wish to establish the norms of test performance for a population of ten-year-old boys in public school, we might test a carefully selected sample of five hundred boys from public schools across several areas. The sample must be a representative cross-section of the population for which the test is designed.

Two of the most important features of any test are its validity and its reliability. As Anastasi (1976) notes, "the validity of the test concerns what the test measures and how well it does so." Validity is not reported simply as "high" or "low"; it is determined with reference to the particular use for which the test is intended. There are three categories of validity:

Content validity involves examination of the test content to ensure that it covers a representative sample of the behavioral domain to be measured.

Criterion-related validity indicates the effectiveness of a test in predicting an individual's behavior in specified situations.

Construct validity is the extent to which the test may be said to measure a theoretical construct or trait — for example, intelligence, anxiety, or verbal fluency.

The validity coefficient is a correlation between the test score and a criterion measure, and is usually determined and reported by the test maker.

Reliability, as Anastasi (1976) explains, "refers to the consistency of scores obtained by the same persons when reexamined with the same test on different occasions, or with different sets of equivalent items, or under variable examining conditions." The reliability coefficient (r) expresses the relationship between the two sets of scores.

Some tests, on the other hand, are criterion-referenced. They measure a student's mastery of specific skills, evaluating the student's performance against his or her own previous performance rather than against other students.