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Sunday, May 7, 2023

Measurement of Individual Differences | Introduction to Growth and Development | Course code 8610 | B.Ed Solved Assignment |

 

QUESTION

How are individual differences measured?

Course: Introduction to Growth and Development

Course code 8610

Level: B.Ed Solved Assignment 

ANSWER 

MEASUREMENT OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Measurement is the assignment of a number to an object or event according to a rule. This may represent something physical, as when you step on the scales and note, with dismay or pleasure the number that indicates your weight. Or it may be more subtle, as when you take a vocational aptitude test and receive your score in medical or engineering aptitude test. To draw a meaningful comparison, measurement must be meaningful. To have meaning, all measurements must satisfy two basic criteria: they must be reliable and they must be valid.

(a)  Reliability is the indication of the consistency of measurement, e.g.: If your weight reads 140Ibs, one day, 240 pounds the next day, and 40 pounds the days after, your faith in the precision of the scale would be secretly shaken. The same is true of psychological tests. Our measurements must be consistent over repeated tests of measurement. A good test should yield roughly the same scores over repeated measurements, as long as that which is being measured does not change dramatically.

(b)  Validity Measurements must also be valid, validity is an indication of the extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure.

(c)  Correlation To give precise statements about reliability and validity, a statistical technique called correlation may be utilized. It allows scientists to make predictions; correlation is a statement about the strength of the association between two (or possibly more) variables. If the correlation between two variables is high, the variables will tend to be very together, that is, wherever one of the traits is found, chances are good that the other trait will also be found. If we observe that people with bland hair usually have blue eyes then we would say that there is a correlation between the variables of hair color and eye color. This is not to say that having bland hair causes one to have blue eyes, but it does allow us to predict, whenever we know that certain individuals have bland hair, that they are also likely to have blue eyes. As discussed earlier, individuals differ in sensitive, affective, and psychomotor abilities.

They differ almost in every respect-personality, attitude, interest, intelligence, and achievement. Individual differences can be identified and measured through finer measurement instruments known as psychological tests. A psychological is a pattern of stimuli, selected and organized to elicit responses that reveal certain psychological characteristics in the person who makes them. The following psychological tests can be used by the teacher or psychologists to measure individual differences.

Test of General Intelligence

Sometimes these tests are also referred to as tests of mental ability, tests of general ability, or tests of scholastic aptitude, these tests measure the psychological traits termed “intelligence” which provide the best possible single clue to the understanding of children’s academic performances. There are various intelligence tests like the standard-binet intelligence test (revised), the Wechsler intelligence scale for children, and various culture-free and culture-fair tests.

Tests of Aptitude

These tests measure the possibilities of success in future performance. One of the most famous batteries, which measures children’s different aptitudes, is the “differential aptitude test battery” which measures the following abilities.

(i)  Verbal Reasoning

(ii)  Numerical Ability

(iii)  Abstract Reasoning

(iv)  Space Relations

(v)  Mechanical Reasoning

(vi)  Clerical Speed and Accuracy

(vii)  Language Usage

Interest Inventories

Strong Vocational Interest Blank and Kuder’s Preference Record (Vocational) are some of the interest inventories that can be used to measure differences among individuals in their interests.

Test of Personality

The MMPI,  Bells Adjustment Inventory, and Projective tests like “The Rorschach Ink Blot test.” Thematic Apperception test and other questionnaires can be used to measure personality structure and adjustment, and difficulties of individuals.

Competence-Based Tests

Tests of achievement, mostly teacher-made types, can be used to measure individual differences in academic achievement. Practically, these tests as prepared by teachers do not measure competence in learning various subjects. The competency-based tests are an improvement over traditional tests and are not difficult to prepare such tests.

Once the teacher knows the learning competencies in various school subjects it becomes easy for the teacher to prepare such tests. It must be noted that scores obtained by a student in any one of the tests may not be a sure measure of his standing in the group. Scores on tests are influenced by several factors, internal and external operating at the time of taking the test. For this purpose scores obtained by one test can be supplemented by scores obtained from other similar tests.

Multiple-choice tests or Essays

What about multiple-choice tests or, as many poorly prepared students like to call them, “multiple-guess tests?” One of the criticisms of the multiple-choice tests is that they reward rote memorization rather than true understanding. This can certainly happen if the test is poorly designed, but when thoroughly researched and carefully prepared, the multiple-choice test can assess a person’s ability to apply concepts to problem-solving situations.

Rather than break up the units of knowledge and isolate the pieces, as the critics typically charge, a well-designed multiple choice test, such as the SAT, demands that the students be able to understand concepts and bring facts together. Research evidence clearly shows that the SAT verbal score shares much in common with IQ, the correlation between them being an extremely high + 0.80.

What about essay questions? There is the fear that standardized tests based only on essay questions and writing samples may hurt learning. Verbally adept but uninformed students may bluff their way through an essay exam. Similarly, the tactics used by some students or memorizing or rotting the topics of subjects also affect the learning process. Essay-type exams, however, illuminate the student’s thought process in more detail, as compared to multiple-choice tests. But for a teacher, with a large class of widely varying abilities, interests and needs may have to rely on multiple-choice tests. It not only ensures the reliability of testing but also more importantly permits free time to work with individual students.

Computer Assisted Testing (CAT)

The computer age has led to a high-tech form of testing called CAT. (Computer-Assisted Testing) Here, the individual sits at a computer keyboard, and the questions are presented on the screen. The testing becomes personalized since the testing is interactive with the computer, in effect custom designing the test to each student’s skill level. For example, the question may get progressively more difficult until a level is reached. When a student begins to get the questions wrong, an easier set of questions suddenly appears. This branching of easier and harder questions called going “up the ladder” or “down the chute” continues until the student's true level of competence is reached. The educational testing services of the USA are currently putting both the SAT and GRE (Graduate Record Exam) on a computer format. Many people believe that CAT is viable, cost-effective, and a big improvement over paper and pencil testing.

The Portfolio Approach

Another testing technique, currently gaining in popularity is called the portfolio approach. Just as an aspiring artist or model carries a portfolio of past work to a prospective employer, so too does the student who selects examples of his or her best work over a term or even an entire year of study. It is said that the portfolio approach places more emphasis on a student’s overall accomplishment than on the ability merely to score well on a single battery of tests. Typical portfolios include original poetry, plays, short stories, essays,s, and art projects. Even in math, a student might produce a series of fractions, showing their relationships to decimals, or an arrangement of dice to illustrate probabilities, or even present an essay on the life of the Prophet “Muhammad” (P.B.U.H).

At the end of the year, the student hands over the portfolios to the teacher for evaluation. Teachers of the new Millennium should be made aware of this approach and should be given workshop preparation in learning this technique. The portfolio method can also be used to evaluate teachers, students, and the curriculum itself. A portfolio that includes, for example, “samples of student’s teacher developed plans and materials, videotaped teaching episodes, and other teacher’s reflections on his or her own teaching can provide direct evidence of what a teacher knows and can do.

Whether the portfolio approach proves to be as valuable as it promises is still in question, but there is no doubt that new testing methods will be employed as educational psychology operates in the 21st century. New testing procedures are on the horizon, procedures intended to bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and psychometric methods.

Grade Equivalent Scores

Grade equivalent scores are based on relating a given student’s score on a test to the average scores found for other students in a particular grade, at the same time of year, and of roughly the same age. For example, assume that in September, a large, representative sample of their graders (III class, students) of the morning group, produce an average score of 30 on a certain arithmetic test. If a given student is then tested and receives a score of 30, that child would be assigned a grade-equivalent score of 3.0 if the child did somewhat better than that and had a score of say 3.4, it would indicate a performance equal to a third-grade student in the fourth month (December) of the school year. Grade equivalent scores are typically reported in tenths of a year so a score of 5.9 refers to the ninth month (June) of the fifth grade, and a score of 0.0 to the first day of Kindergarten. Thus, the scores range from 0.0 (or sometimes ko) through 12.9, representing the thirteen years of school from Kindergarten through grade 12. The first of September is given on the score as 0, whereas the end of September is 0.1, the end of October is 0.2, and on until the end of June is 0.9.

Curriculum Testing

Virtually any curriculum that is more than five years old requires a thorough evaluation, this is most obvious in fields such as science but should be done in all areas. This type of testing answers the following:

 (a)  To what degree have the curriculum’s goals been reached?

(b)  Is the curriculum content appropriate given the mission’s objectives.

(c)  Has the instruction been truly based on the curriculum.

(d)  Has the assessment measured the taught curriculum or planned.


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