HISTORICAL, CULTURAL and LEGAL/ETHICAL CONSIDERATION HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Nineteenth Century As early as 2200 BCE, tests and testing

g first came into being in China as a means of selecting who would obtain government jobs; Applicants were tested on their proficiency in endeavours such as music, archery, horsemanship, writing, arithmetic, agriculture, geography, revenue, civil law, and military strategy. During the Song dynasty, emphasis was placed on knowledge on classical literature; those who demonstrated command on the classics were perceived as having acquired the wisdom of the past and entitled to a government position. Consequential privileges for official position: o Wearing special garb entitled them to be accorded special courtesies by anyone they happened to meet; o Exempt one from government-sponsored interrogation by torture if the individual was suspected of committing a crime. Greco-Roman writings indicative of attempts to categorize people in terms of personality types overabundance or deficiency in some bodily fluids. Renaissance measurement in the modern sense began to emerge; 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. o Darwin argued that chance variation in species would be selected or rejected by nature according to adaptability and survival value; o Spurred scientific interest in individual differences. Francis Galton Darwins half cousin; became extremely influential contributor to the field of measurement as he endeavoured to explore and quantify individual differences. o Credited with devising or contributing to the development of many contemporary tools of psychological assessment including questionnaires, rating scales, and self-report inventories. o Pioneered the use of coefficient and correlation (although Karl Pearson developed the product-moment correlation technique) Assessment was also an important activity in the first psychological laboratory founded by Wundt. o Variables include reaction time, perception, and attention span;

o Wundt focused on questions relating to how people were similar, not different. James McKeen Cattell student of Wundt at Leipzig; completed a doctoral dissertation that dealt with individual differences; inspired by Galton, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1888 and coined the term mental test in an 1890 publication. Other students of Wundt: o Charles Spearman credited for originating the concept of test reliability and building the mathematical framework for the statistical technique of factor analysis; o Victor Henri collaborate with Alfred Binet on papers suggesting how mental tests could be used to measure higher mental processes; o Emil Kraepelin an early experimenter with the word association technique as a formal test; o Lightner Witmer little-known founder of clinical psychology Twentieth Century: The Measurement of Intelligence: As early as 1895, Binet and Henri published several articles in which they argued for the measurement of abilities such as memory and social comprehension; 10 years later, Binet collaborated with Theodore Simon and published a 30item measuring scale of intelligence designed to help identify mentally retarded Paris schoolchildren; 1939 David Wechsler introduced a test designed to measure adult intelligence. o Intelligence is the aggregate if global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment (Wechsler, 1939) o The test was christened the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, but was subsequently revised and renamed Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Group intelligence test devised by Binet; came into being into US in response to the militarys need for an efficient method of screening the intellectual ability of WWI recruits. The Measurement of Personality:

 WWI brought the need to screen the intellectual functioning and general adjustment of the recruits; Robert S. Woodworth developed a measure of adjustment and emotional stability that could be administered quickly and sufficiently to groups of recruits o To disguise the true purpose of the test, the questionnaire was labelled as a Personal Data Sheet After the war, Woodworth developed a personality test for civilian use and called it Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory (the first widely used selfreport test). Projective test individual is assumed to project onto some ambiguous stimulus his/her own unique needs, fears, hopes and motivations Rorschach Inkblot test the best known of all projective test; developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. 1930s pictures were used as projective stimuli; popularized by Henry A. Murray, Christina D. Morgan and colleagues at Harvard Psychological Clinic. The Academic and Applied Traditions: Psychological testing and assessment are practiced today in university psychology laboratories as a means of furthering knowledge about human and animal behavior.