PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING: DEVELOPMENT, APPLICATION, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR MULTICULTURAL ISSUES
This paper reviews the historical development of psychological testing, together with the implications of psychological testing for multicultural issues in the United States. Among the issues addressed in the review are validity, reliability, and standardization, as these concepts related to psychological testing.
Based on the review presented in this paper, it appears unlikely that researchers purposefully build bias into psychological tests. Nevertheless, a reasonable assumption is that variations in home support and resources contribute substantially to a lag in intellectual development that current psychological tests are unable to discern. This situation does not invalidate the psychological testing paradigm; however, it does indicate that factors other than test results must influence policy development based on test outcomes.
There is growing concern about the effectiveness of social policy in the United States. Problems in primary and secondary education involving low academic performance appear to be both symptomatic of and important contributors to broader social ills. Serious criminal behaviors appear to be working their way down the age ladder. Serious performance differentials between different ethnic groups exist both in education and in the workplace. Widespread failures in social policy contribute to the development of problems that frequently require costly interventions in other policy areas, such as welfare and law enforcement (Moxley & Manela, 2001).
Applied psychology is an important support both for the development of social policy. Further, psychology provides important tools for use in the identification of social problems and the development of solutions to those problems. One of the more important, as well as controversial, of these tools is psychological testing (Prilleltensky, 2001).
This paper ...