Variations in Psychological Attributes
This domain tests whether you can name the main theories of intelligence, separate intelligence from aptitude, interest and creativity, and judge a psychological test by its psychometric standards. Questions are usually recall plus application: a short description of a person, then "which theory best explains this?"
Theories of intelligence
- Spearman: every task draws on a general factor g plus a task-specific s.
- Thurstone: seven primary mental abilities - verbal comprehension, numerical ability, spatial relations, perceptual speed, memory, reasoning and word fluency.
- Guilford's Structure of Intellect: operations × contents × products, giving 180 cells; he emphasised divergent thinking.
- Gardner: multiple intelligences - linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic. They are held to be relatively independent.
- Sternberg's triarchic theory: componential (analysis), experiential (novelty and automatisation) and contextual (practical, culturally situated) intelligence.
- Das: the PASS model - Planning, Attention, Arousal, Simultaneous and Successive processing.
- Emotional intelligence: perceiving, understanding and regulating emotions in oneself and others.
Distinguishing the attributes
Aptitude is the potential to acquire a skill with training. Interest is a preference for an activity. Achievement is what has already been learnt. Creativity is originality that is also useful; Guilford's divergent-thinking dimensions are fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.
Judging a test
Reliability is the consistency of scores; validity is whether the test measures what it claims; norms supply a comparison group; standardisation means uniform administration and scoring.
Worked example
A test yields almost the same score on two sittings a month apart, but those scores do not predict school marks. Reasoning: stable scores show high reliability, while failure to predict the criterion shows low criterion validity. Verdict: reliable but not valid.
Traps
Aptitude is not achievement. Gardner's list is a theoretical proposal, not a set of independently validated tests. Reliability is necessary but not sufficient for validity. Do not treat an IQ score as a complete or fixed measure of a person.