Welcome to another video by Psychology for Life. This video is about the history of psychological testing and assessment. There is a saying that goes, Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it.
It is worthwhile for us to look back at the history of psychological testing and assessment because it is a fascinating story and it has abundant lessons for us to learn. and it is relevant to present-day practices. Historians note that rudimentary forms of testing existed as early as 2200 P.C.
when the Chinese emperor had his officials examined every third year to determine their fitness for office. Such testing was modified and refined over the centuries until written exams were introduced in the Han Dynasty. Five topics were tested, civil law, military affairs, agriculture, revenue, and geography.
Psychological testing owes much to early psychiatry. In fact, the examination of the mentally ill around the middle of the 19th century resulted in the development of numerous early tests. However, these tests were not standardized and were later on forgotten. They were nonetheless influential in determining the course of psychological testing. In 1885, the German physician Hubert von Graschi developed the disident of the memory drum as a means of testing brain-injured patients.
Shortly thereafter, the German psychiatrist Conrad Riggier developed an excessively ambitious test battery for brain damage. This battery took over 100 hours to administer and soon fell out of favor. Most sources credit Wilhelm Wundt. with founding the first psychological laboratory in 1879 in St. Germany. However, as early as 1862, Von was already using his thought meter supposedly to measure the swiftness of thought of observers.
Experimental psychology flourished in the late 1800s in continental Europe and Great Britain. However, the new experimental psychology was itself a dead end. at least as far as psychological testing was concerned. The problem was that the early experimental psychologists mistook simple sensory processes for intelligence. They used assorted brass instruments to measure sensory threshold and reaction times, thinking that such abilities were at the heart of intelligence.
Hence, this period is sometimes referred to as the brass instruments era of psychological testing. As Wundt was propagating experimental psychology in Germany, Sir Francis Galton pioneered a new experimental psychology in 19th century Great Britain. Galton was obsessed with measurement and his intellectual career seems to have been dominated by a belief that virtually anything is measurable.
His attempts to measure intellect by means of reaction time and sensory discrimination tasks are well known. Yet to appreciate his wide-ranging interests, he also devised techniques for measuring beauty. personality, the boringness of lectures, the effects of prayer, to name a few.
Galton's two most important works were Hereditary Genius, published in 1869, which is an empirical analysis to prove that genetic factors were overwhelmingly important for the attainment of eminence, and his second work is Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, published in 1883. which is a series of essays that emphasized individual differences in mental faculties. Galvin borrowed the time-consuming psychophysical procedures practiced by Bond and others of the European continent and adapted them to a series of simple and quick sensory motor measures. He is credited as the father of mental testing. To further his study of individual differences, Galvin set up a psychometric laboratory in London at the International Health Exhibition of DDP.
It was later transferred to the London Museum where it was maintained for six years. At least 17,000 individuals were tested during 1880s and 1890s. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. In 1897, he created the first sentence completion test.
During those times, the Western world of late 1800s was just emerging. from centuries of indifference and hostility toward the psychiatrically and mentally impaired. At the forefront of these developments were two French physicians, J.E.E. Esquirol and O.E.
Seguin, each of whom revolutionized thinking about those with mental rehabilitation. Esquirol's diagnostic breakthrough was noting that mental retardation was a lifelong developmental phenomenon whereas mental illness usually had a more abrupt onset in adulthood. He thought that mental retardation was incurable whereas mental illness might show improvement. Perhaps more than any other pioneer in the field of mental retardation, O. Edward Seguin helped establish a new humanism toward those with mental retardation in the late 80s.
His treatment efforts earned him international acclaim, and he eventually came to the United States to continue his work. In 1866, he published Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method, the first major textbook on the treatment of mental retardation. James McKean Cattell studied the new experimental psychology with both Bunt and Galton before settling at Columbia University, where for 26 years he was the undisputed dean of American psychology.
He spent his career following the footsteps of Galton studying reaction time and sensory discrimination as an indicator of intelligence. Cattell had many famous doctoral students. Among them were E. L. Thorndike, who made monumental contributions to learning theory and educational psychology, R.
S. Woodworth, who was the author of the very popular and influential Experimental Psychology, and E. K. Strong, whose vocational interest, black, since revised, is still in wide use. But among Cattell students, it was probably Clark Whistler who had the greatest influence on the early history of psychological testing.
Whistler obtained both mental test scores and academic grades from more than 300 students at Columbia University and Barnard College. His goal was to demonstrate that test results could predict academic performance. Unfortunately, the results showed virtually no tendency for mental test scores to correlate with academic achievement. With the publication of Whistler's 1901 discouraging results, experimental psychologists largely abandoned the use of reaction time and sensory discrimination.
as measures of intelligence. For his part, Whistler was apparently so discouraged by his results that he immediately switched to anthropology, where he became a strong environmentalist in explaining differences between ethnic groups. Almost every student in psychology knows that Alfred Binet invented the first modern intelligence test in 1905. However, less well-known about him was that he began his career in medicine but was forced to drop out because of a complete emotional breakdown. He switched to psychology and later selected an apprenticeship with a neurologist, J.M. Charcot.
For a brief period of time, Binet's professional path paralleled that of Sigmund Freud. Later on, he co-authored four studies supposedly demonstrating that reversing the polarity of a magnet could induce completely changes or transfer hysterical paralysis in a single hypnotized subject. Binet later published the recommendation of his findings because of criticism from other psychologists. This was a painful episode for Binet and it sent his career into temporary need.
Nonetheless, he learned important lessons from this embarrassment. First was that he never again used sloppy experimental procedures that allowed for unintentional suggestions to influence his results. In 1904, the Minister of Public Instruction in Paris appointed a commission to decide upon the educational measures that should be undertaken with those children who could not profit from regular instruction. Binet and his colleague Simon were told upon to develop a practical tool for justice purpose. Thus arose the first formal scale for assessing the intelligence of children.
In 1906, Henry H. Goddard was hired by the Vinland Training School in New Jersey to do research on the classification and education of feeble-minded children. He soon realized that a diagnostic instrument would be required and was therefore pleased to read of the 1908 Binet-Simon scale. He quickly set about translating the scale, making minor changes so that it would be applicable to American children.
In 1910, Goddard was invited to Ellis Island by the Commissioner of Immigration to help make the examination of immigrants more accurate. A dark and foreboding folklore had grown up around mental deficiency and immigration in the early 1900s. It was believed that the feeble-minded were degenerate beings, responsible for many, if not most, social problems, that they produced at an alarming rate and menaced the nation's overall health. biological fitness. Henry H. Goddard became one of the most influential psychologists during his time.
He is most remembered for testing immigrants at Ellis Island. Unfortunately, he interpreted the results of testing to mean that they were people-minded. William Stern was a German psychologist who introduced the IQ or intelligence quotient, the mental age divided by chronological age. Previously, Binet and Simon had subtracted the mental age from the chronological age. In 1916, Louis Stern revised the Binet-Simon scales and published the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales that continues to be used up to now.
The slow pace of developments in group testing picked up dramatically as the United States entered World War I in 1917. It was then that Robert M. Yerkes, a well-known psychology professor at Harvard, convinced the U.S. government and the Army that all of its 1.75 billion recruits should be given intelligence tests for purposes of classification and assignment. Modern personality testing began when Woodward attempted to develop an instrument for detecting army recruits who were susceptible to psychoneurosis. Virtually all the modern personality inventories, schedules, and questionnaires owe a debt to Woodward's personality issue.
While the Americans were pursuing the empirical approach to objective personality testing, a young Swiss psychiatrist, Herman Rorschach, was developing a computer. completely different vehicle for studying personality. Rorschach was strongly influenced by Jungian and psychoanalytic thinking, so it is natural that his new approach focused on the tendency of patients to reveal their innermost conflicts unconsciously when responding to ambiguous stimuli. The Rorschach and other projective tests discussed subsequently were predicated upon the projective hypothesis.
When responding to ambiguous or unstructured stimuli, We inadvertently disclose our innermost needs, fantasies, and conflicts. The Psychological Corporation was founded in 1921. It was the first major test publisher founded by Cattell, Thorndike, and Whitworth. One of the few women in the history of psychological testing was Florence Goodenough. She worked with Louis Thurman and in 1926, She published the measurement of intelligence by drawing and created the draw a man test, which is now called the draw a person test.
But her greatest contribution to psychology was her advancement of sampling in 1920. Edward Kellogg Strong was the one who published the Strong Vocational Interest Plan in 1927. It became the most widely used test of all time and is still used today as a strong interest inventory. It is used in vocational guidance to guide persons to the career that best suits them. Louis Leon Thurstone developed the Thurstone Personality Schedule, an inventory of neurosis.
In 1935, he together with E. L. Thorndike and J. T. Guilford founded the journal Psychometrica and also the Psychometric Society and he became its first president.
Henry Muray together with Christiana Morgan, his mistress, created the Thematic of Perception test, which was published in 1935. This was supposed to be a test that measured normal personality in terms of needs. David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist. In 1939, together with Bellevue, he published the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale.
Revisions of this scale were published in 1935-1936. It continues to be used until now. In 1942, the MMPI was published.
The MMPI is the Minnesota Multifacet Personality Inventory created by McKinley and Hathaway. In 1948, John M. Buck published the Heil Street Person Test to measure intellectual ability. In 1949, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children was published by David Wechsler. In 1947, Henry Muray established the Psychological Clinic Annex in Harvard. Between 1959 to early 1962, Muray was responsible for unethical experiments in which he used 22 Harvard undergraduates and submitted them to vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive attacks.
One of the 22 was Theodore Kaczynski. a mathematics prodigy who later on became the Unabomber, targeting academics and technologists for 18 years. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, in 1961, the Philippine Psychological Corporation was founded.
In 1985, Ana Daisy Carlota, following the footsteps of Virgilio Enriquez, created the Panukat ng Pagkataong Pilipino, the first measure of Filipino personality. Later on, Gregorio H. Dal Pilar created the Masaklaw ng Panukat ng Do or Mapa ng Do. The foregoing presentation is a brief summary of the history of assessment psychology.
The question for reflection is, what are the lessons we can learn from the history of assessment psychology? And there you have it. Thank you so much for watching this video until the very end. Please like, share, and subscribe.