Foundations of Psychological Testing: A Practical Approach - Hardcover

The Third Edition of this text offers a straight forward and clear introduction to the basics of psychological testing as well as to psychometrics and statistics for students new to the field.

The authors focus on relating core ideas to practical situations that students will recognize and relate to. They provide a variety of pedagogical tools that promote student understanding of the underlying concepts required to interpret and to use test scores. Primarily concerned with preparing students to become informed consumers and users of tests, the text also features a final section focusing on how tests are utilized in three important settings: education, clinical and counseling practice, and organizations.

New and Proven Features

- Instructs using an effective conversational tone, such as in the discussion of true scores and error in classical test theory-concepts with which students typically struggle

- Incorporates more discussion of specific tests in response to reviewer feedback, with direct examples from published tests and more details of tests featured in “Test Spotlights”

- Provides new material on using validity generalization strategies in pre-employment testing and on traditional versus authentic assessment

- Includes updates for all relevant chapters to reflect how the APA Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing treats validity as a unitary concept rather than discussing different types of validity

- Focuses on validity as the appropriateness of the inferences made from test scores rather than whether a test measures what it was designed to measure

- Offers even more discussion questions, useful for guiding classroom learning

- Features rich pedagogical tools, such as chapter-opening narratives; “For Your Information” boxes highlighting interesting related material; “In the News” boxes featuring testing stories from the news and “On the Web” boxes offering useful web resources; summary sections throughout chapters; and chapter-ending “Engaging in the Learning Process” sections with interactive learning activities and self-test questions

Robert L. Lovler, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience working both as an internal and external consultant to Fortune 500 companies in the areas of employee assessment and selection, organizational development, strategic human resource consulting, and training design and delivery. His career began at CBS Inc. where he served in a several roles including Director of Training for their retail consumer electronics unit, then moving up to Vice- President of two different units within the CBS Publishing Group. He is currently is Vice-President of Human Resources and Practice Leader for Selection and Assessment at Wilson Learning Corporation, a consulting firm which focuses on human performance improvement. During his career, he has had the opportunity to design and implement a wide range of organizational interventions both domestically and internationally, working in Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, England and Italy. In the U.S., he supervised the development and implementation of the assessment center used to select candidates for entry into the Environmental Protection Agency’s Senior Executive Service Development Program, presenting the results in Washington D.C. to Governor Christie Todd Whitman, the EPA Administrator. He also developed the selection system used to help select commercial airline pilots for a major U.S. airline and worked with former Senator Warren Rudman to develop and implement a nationwide survey of sales practices in the rent-to-own industry. He has served as a testing consultant to the California Bar Association, the state of Pennsylvania and oversaw the development of the licensure examinations for medical physicists in the state of Texas. He has been on the adjunct faculty of the State University of New York at Farmingdale, Hofstra University and the University of Central Florida. He holds master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Hofstra University and is a member of the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology.