A test is an inspective tool or practice where a part of the behavior, view, performance, or characteristics of the person or object being evaluated is scrutinized or evaluated within a specified domain and the result ranked using an unvarying process or procedure.
Answers the question, what is a test?
One factor that influenced the historical development of testing is the birth of the clinical psychology field of study that highly involved testing in its work. The wide nature of clinical psychology to cover counseling among other disciplines brought about more need for the development of testing.
In the practice of clinical psychology, there was an acute need for a device of testing methods that brought about the need for a laboratory for analysis and medication. The high level of participation of these psychologists was in the military at the time of world wars one and two. The national government greatly invested in the education and progress of these psychologists in the field of clinical psychology, therefore, giving rise to the use of testing and the need for better working methods of testing.
The scientific impulse was the curious need to make things more scientific wherein historical writings it’s evident that there was the pursuit of scientific measurement. In the field of education, educators also sought to make the education practice scientific leading to the making of new types of tests to achieve this. The need for having a scientific method and modes of analysis contributed to the development. The motivation that resulted from the success of previous scientific tests prompted the development of the test practice. In this same perspective, other fields of study greatly influenced the scientific influence that contributed to the development of testing. An example of this was in law, medicine, community work, and clinical psychology that emphasized the need for testing. The need and pursuit of reliable success also led to the development of the same. The need to quantify the facts of human existence and nature also prompted the development of testing.
Looks at the origin of clinical psychology and explains its application in everyday life
Test norms; this is a form of assessment and standardization in group testing to know the average attainment of a person relative to the group commonly examined. In the compilation of test norms, you will often use mean, mode and median. Test norms are evaluators of the individuals’ performance against the group they are exposed to the same assessment.
Percentiles norms are the measures used to explain an individual’s location of performance within the homogenous group in terms of the percentage of individuals who have scored less than the individual. Score norms are the evaluator methods of measuring an individual’s performance against peer institutions or group influence about group performance.
Developmental norms are standards of evaluating the progress of an individual for example the age at which a child crawls, or the time a child takes to understand a concept in class. This is done to examine if the child is developing normally in the field in question and is also useful in judging which curriculum is best for a given student or group.
Looks at different types of norms. It also gives an in-depth analysis of each and finally gives an evaluation of them
The strength of these norms is that they give the relative performance of the individual against the group. They depict levels of competence of individuals in different disciplines. They can be used to predict future performance. They are also used in curriculum assigning and design for example according to ages.
The weakness of these norms is that they do not take into consideration the personal qualities and differences of the individuals subjected to the same test. An example of these personal differences are talents, rates/ speed of understanding, and the level of interest in the given subject that affects the performance of individuals within the group.
Unreliability of test scores is brought about by the introduction of new concepts, ideas, and skills of study, personal differences of students, and varying factors like the time available for study, the number of teachers, competence of teaching staff, and favorability of different academic environment.
Internal consistency is the evaluation based on the interrelation of different items within a test covered in a wider analysis. It tests if the items proposing the general result produce similar scores. If the range is between one and zero it depicts more reliability but a higher score may indicate redundancy of the items. (Colman, 1995).