Understanding and Utilizing Psychological Testing
摘要
Psychological testing often provides a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of a child’s development to support diagnostic clarity and make relevant recommendations. Learning aptitude and achievement, intelligence and cognition, temperament and personality, emotional and behavioral health, and adaptive functioning all can be measured through a series of standardized procedures. Clinicians often review previous reports to incorporate into their assessment or recommend new testing be conducted as part of their evaluation. Sometimes psychological testing reports are difficult to read and other times test results are not fully interpreted within the youth’s culture and context. This chapter helps clinicians less familiar with psychological testing come to understand the role of psychologists, the benefits and limitations of a variety of tests, and methods for interpreting a psychological testing report. With a case example, we walk through the process from start to finish, culminating in the interpretation of a sample report. In this manner, we highlight how to decipher statistical jargon, unpack the meaning of results, and interpret findings within a client’s culture and context. Clinicians walk away with a foundation of how to approach psychological testing with ‘critical curiosity.’