Psychological and Educational Test Scores: What Are They?

This text is designed for individuals who must interpret test results or scores regardless of their understanding of tests such as psychiatrists, social workers, school principals, admissions personnel, physicians, attorneys, teachers, and parents. The book provides a much needed narrative understanding of the primary psychological test theories and how these theories influence test scores and other factors, such as reliability and validity. Chapter 1, Basic Statistics, discusses correlation coefficients as fundamental to finding reliability and validity measures. Chapter 2, Theories of Psychological and Educational Test Scores, presents the classical theory, generalizability theory, and item response theory that influence psychological and educational test scores. Chapter 3, Reliability, illustrates how to select and interpret the appropriate type of reliability. Chapter 4, Validity, provides the computer command codes for running factor analysis and structural! equation models. Chapter 5, Pulling It Together, discusses a variety of ways to measure both reliability and validity. Chapter 6, Common Psychological and Educational Tests, describes several commonly used personality instruments and interest inventories as well as tests of mental ability, projective techniques, and depression and anxiety inventories. Chapter 7, Interpreting Psychological and Educa-tional Test Scores within a Psychological Report, discusses report format and test interpretation. Finally, Chapter 8, Psychological Test Score Terms, helps characterize test terms and provides the reader with narrative discussions of them. This text serves as a unique resource that addresses psychological and educational test scores for lay audiences and quantitatively-oriented readers.