Psychological Testing and Assessment: An Introduction to Tests and Measurement

 (12 customer reviews)

I was surprised to see this book ranked so poorly and then read the predominantly negative reviews of this book. As a psychology instructor and a PhD student I've found this book to be invaluable. It is an excellent introduction to the topic and although I have over a dozen reference tools on psychological assessment I frequently refer to this one when I need a concise definition or brief discussion of a topic. I recommend to my students who are headed to grad school to hang on to this text!

Unfortunately, I found the book a necessary evil. It was a required text for my Master's program tests and measurements course, otherwise, I would have never bought and read it. It does cover a lot of material, and I did receive a good understanding of what psychological testing and assessment is all about. But the style!.. It sometimes took me 4-5 attempts to read a passage and make sense out of it. Some chapters (like a Statistical Refresher) felt like the authors made their very best to make sure the readers won't understand a word. With a few exceptions of entertaining examples, the book is boring and is written in a very difficult language.

Another point - for the kind of price I expected the illustrations to be in color. Well, all illustrations (good thing, there are many of them, at least) are black & white with occasional pink.

This textbook covers a lot of material, but in an unsystematic way: the definitions are not worded in a predictable and consistent manner, the more important issues are not given priority over the less important ones, but everything is simply thrown together into an indigestible and boring glob.