Psychological Testing: A Practical Approach to Design and Evaluation offers a fresh and innovative approach for graduate students and faculty in the fields of testing, measurement, psychometrics, research design, and related areas of study. Author Theresa J.B. Kline guides readers through the process of designing and evaluating a test, while ensuring that the test meets the highest professional standards. The author uses simple, clear examples throughout and fully details the required statistical analyses. Topics include—but are not limited to—design of item stems and responses; sampling strategies; classical and modern test theory; IRT program examples; reliability of tests and raters; validation using content, criterion-related, and factor analytic approaches; test and item bias; and professional and ethical issues in testing.

Illuminating detailed methods for assessing bias in commonly used I.Q., aptitude, and achievement tests, Jensen argues that standardized tests are not biased against Englishspeaking minority groups and describes the uses of such tests in education and employment.

The cultural-test-bias hypothesis is one of the most important scien tific questions facing psychology today. Briefly, the cultural-test-bias hypothesis contends that all observed group differences in mental test scores are due to a built-in cultural bias of the tests themselves; that is, group score differences are an artifact of current psychomet ric methodology. If the cultural-test-bias hypothesis is ultimately shown to be correct, then the 100 years or so of psychological research on human differences (or differential psychology, the sci entific discipline underlying all applied areas of human psychology including clinical, counseling, school, and industrial psychology) must be reexamined and perhaps dismissed as confounded, contam inated, or otherwise artifactual. In order to continue its existence as a scientific discipline, psychology must confront the cultural-test-bias hypothesis from the solid foundations of data and theory and must not allow the resolution of this issue to occur solely within (and to be determined by) the political Zeitgeist of the times or any singular work, no matter how comprehensive. In his recent volume Bias in Mental Testing (New York: Free Press, 1980), Arthur Jensen provided a thorough review of most of the empirical research relevant to the evaluation of cultural bias in psychological and educational tests that was available at the time that his book was prepared. Nevertheless, Jensen presented only one per spective on those issues in a volume intended not only for the sci entific community but for intelligent laypeople as well.

This book is for those of the general public who want to learn more about mental testing and its controversies. It presupposes no background in the specialized terminologies or mathematical underpinnings of psychometrics, statistics, or quantitative genetics that make most of the serious literature on the "IQ controversy" so inaccessible to the educated public who are not professionals in the field of mental measurement.