Tests adaptativos informatizados: una perspectiva general / Computerized adaptive testing: a general perspective

Los tests adaptativos informatizados (TAIs) adaptan las preguntas a administrar a cada examinado según sus respuestas a las preguntas previas. De este modo, se consiguen estimaciones de su nivel de rasgo más precisas o se reduce la longitud del test. En los últimos años, se han desarrollo diversos TAIs en España y es probable que, dadas las ventajas que ofrece esta técnica, sean bastantes más lo que se hagan disponibles próximamente. El objetivo de este trabajo es ofrecer una visión actualizada de este campo. Para ello, se presenta la estructura básica de un TAI y se comentan los distintos pasos que lo componen. Se hace especial énfasis en la selección de ítems, la parte fundamental para la adaptatibilidad del test, desde la perspectiva de los cuatros objetivos que ha de satisfacer un TAI: (a) precisión, (b) seguridad del banco de ítems, (c) control de contenidos, y (d) mantenimiento de la prueba (AU)

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) adapts the items to be administered to each examinee according to the responses to the previous items. In this way, more accurate trail level estimations can be obtained or test length is reduced. In the last years, several CATs have been developed in Spain and it can be expected that, given the advantages of this technique, more will become available soon. The goal of this work is to offer and updated view of this topic. For doing so, the basic structure of a CAT is presented and the different steps composing it are commented. Special emphasis is given ot item selection, the fundamental part for the adaptability of the test, from the perspective of the four objectives that must be satisfied by a CAT: (a) accuracy, (b) item bank security; (c) content balance; and (d) test maintenance (AU)

A history of the early days of personality testing in American industry: an obsession with adjustment.

Objective personality testing began with Woodworth's Personal Data Sheet in 1917. That test was developed to identify soldiers prone to nervous breakdowns during enemy bombardment in World War I (WWI). Soon after, many competing personality tests were developed for use in industry. Many of these tests, like Woodworth's, focused on the construct of employee maladjustment and were deemed important in screening out applicants who would create workplace disturbances. In this article, the authors review the history of these early personality tests, especially the Bernreuter Personality Inventory and the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, and discuss the implications of personality testers' obsession with the construct of employee maladjustment. In addition, the authors discuss the industry's obsession with emotional maladjustment and how this obsession coincided with a cultural shift in norms relating to cultural expression.

My life in testing.

This autobiographical essay describes my career as a psychodiagnostician, which began at the City College of New York in 1941 and ended in the late 1970s when I became a full-time psychoanalyst in Manhattan. As a green, 20-year-old psychology undergraduate, I was picked by Gardner Murphy to assist David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who was developing new methods for using psychological tests to diagnose and treat soldiers during World War II. Our findings were presented in the classic, two volume work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing, published in 1945-1946 (Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945-1946; 1968), to which I added two clinically enriched monographs: The Clinical Application of Psychological Tests, published in 1948 (Schafer, 1948/1995), and Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (Schafer, 1954), published in 1954. After the Menninger Clinic, I continued to hone my assessment expertise at the Austen Riggs Center and Yale University, but I also sought opportunities to develop psychotherapy skills. I completed psychoanalytic training in 1960 at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and thereafter sought positions that would offer more time for treating patients. A notable highpoint in my testing career was assessing Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. I look back fondly at my years as an assessment psychologist, which produced nearly 4 decades of great memories.

The critical impact of Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb: race, gender, and personality testing of North and West Africans.

In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General declared publicly that culture counts in mental health care. This welcome recognition of the role of culture in mental health appears somewhat belated. In 1956, Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb both presented culturally sensitive studies of the Thematic Apperception Test at the major French-language mental health conference. The contrast between these two studies and between the careers of Fanon and Collomb reveals some of the difficulties in creating cultural and gender sensitivity in psychiatry or psychology.

Perfil psicopatológico e de personalidade do paciente com diagnóstico exclusivo de ejaculação precoce primária / Psychopathologic and personality patients profile with exclusive diagnosis of primary premature ejaculation

Considerando-se a alta prevalência da ejaculação precoce dentre os transtornos sexuais masculinos, indefinições diagnósticas, terapêuticas e em prevenção relativas a esta disfunção sexual, sua associação conceitual com ansiedade e personalidade, pouco pesquisada, bem como a carência de estudos relacionando estes parâmetros à ejaculação precoce primária, o autor desenvolveu um estudo visando aferir se há um perfil psicopatológico / Considering the high prevalence of the premature ejaculation among the male sexual upheavals, diagnosis and therapeutically indefinitions and in prevention related to this sexual dysfunction, its conceptual association with anxiety and personality little searched, as well as the lack of studies relating these parameters to the primary premature ejaculation, the author developed a study aiming to survey if it has a psychopathologic and personality profile from the...

Dynamics of personality test responses: the empiricist's manifesto revisited.

This article revisits the classic empirical manifesto written by Meehl in 1945, and examines subsequent developments in structured personality assessment. The current status of personality assessment from an empirical-scale-development perspective is presented, with examples drawn from recent work on the MMPI-2. Meehl's heuristic defense of empirically based personality-scale construction was reexamined and the lasting influences of these views were highlighted. Meehl's early conceptualization of the relative unimportance of item content in personality-test construction and several alternative views were summarized, and Meehl's modified position was described. The role that test-taking attitudes can play in personality assessment was discussed in the 1945 article, and Meehl's views on the need for appraisal of invalidating conditions have been reaffirmed in contemporary test development. Finally, the so-called "dynamics" of a structured personality item response were discussed from a contemporary perspective, and some recent research was included to illustrate the continued importance of anchoring test interpretation in empirical correlates.