Does Wechsler Intelligence Scale administration and scoring proficiency improve during assessment training?

Studies have found that Wechsler scale administration and scoring proficiency is not easily attained during graduate training. These findings may be related to methodological issues. Using a single-group repeated measures design, this study documents statistically significant, though modest, error reduction on the WAIS-III and WISC-III during a graduate course in assessment. The study design does not permit the isolation of training factors related to error reduction, or assessment of whether error reduction is a function of mere practice. However, the results do indicate that previous study findings of no or inconsistent improvement in scoring proficiency may have been the result of methodological factors. Implications for teaching individual intelligence testing and further research are discussed.

Interference and time: a brief review and an integration.

Contemporary theories of associative learning have been preoccupied with the phenomenon of stimulus competition (attenuated responding to a target stimulus-outcome association if another stimulus trained together with the target is a better or more reliable predictor of the outcome). In recent years, reports of associative interference between associations trained separately have challenged associative learning theories, which provide no mechanism to account for this type of interference. Moreover, the ever-growing reports of temporal relationships between stimuli being a variable that determines the occurrence of stimulus competition and associative interference call for a reformulation of associative theory that can account for both interference and temporal learning effects. Here, we briefly review some of the central findings in stimulus competition, associative interference, and temporal learning, as well as a recently-proposed integration of these three seemingly disparate families of phenomena.