294 Assessment Psychology
educational, occupational, and other everyday life activities.
Armed with this information, psychologists and the people to
whom they consult can predict degrees of success and failure
in these activities, identify what kinds of skill improvements
are needed to enhance success level, and propose types of
intervention or training that will be likely to enhance these
deficient skills in the particular person being evaluated. In
addition to basing performance predictions and treatment
plans on the nature and extent of functioning deficits associ-
ated with brain damage from whatever source, neuropsycho-
logical examiners can use retesting data to monitor changes
in functioning capacity over time. Refined measures of neu-
ropsychological functioning can help to assess the rate and
amount of declining capacity in conditions that involve
progressive deterioration, and they can likewise quantify the
pace of progress in persons recovering from brain disease or
injury. Neuropsychological assessment has consequently be-
come common practice in diverse applied settings ranging
from forensic consultation to rehabilitation planning.
MEASURING ACHIEVEMENT, APTITUDES,
AND INTERESTS
As noted in previous sections of the chapter, intellectual and
personality assessment emerged largely out of a perceived
necessity for administrators to make decisions about people,
specifically with respect to their educational requirements
and their eligibility for military service. By contrast, methods
of assessing achievement, aptitudes, and interests were de-
veloped primarily to help people make decisions about them-
selves. To be sure, measures of what a person is able to do or
is interested in doing can be used to determine class place-
ment in the schools or personnel selection in organizations.
More commonly, however, these measures have been used to
help people plan their educational and vocational future on
the basis of what appear to be their abilities and interests.
Early formulations identified tests of achievement as ways
of measuring the effects of learning, as distinguished from
“native ability” that was independent of learning and mea-
sured by aptitude and intelligence tests. There remains a gen-
eral consensus that aptitude tests serve to predict a person’s
potential for improved performance following education or
training in some endeavor, whereas achievement tests serve
to evaluate the performance level attained at a particular
point in time. It is also widely agreed, however, that “aptitude
test” scores are influenced by learning and life experience as
well as inborn talents, and that “achievement test” scores
identify future potential as well as present accomplishment.
Accordingly, what respondents display on both kinds of tests
is the extent to which they have developed certain kinds
of abilities, and little purpose is served by rigid distinctions
between these types of measures (see Anastasi & Urbina,
1997, chap. 17). With this in mind, the discussion that fol-
lows traces briefly the development of four measures of
achievement/aptitude and interest that have deep roots in the
history of assessment psychology and enjoy continued wide-
spread use: the Wide-Range Achievement Test, the Strong
Interest Inventory, the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey,
and the Holland Self-Directed Search.Wide-Range Achievement TestIn the United States, formal achievement testing began in the
schools during the early 1920s. Tests of specific competen-
cies (e.g., spelling) had been developed prior to that time,
but group-administered batteries for assessing a broad range
of academic skills began with the 1923 publication of the
Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), which was designed for
use with elementary school students. This was followed in
1925 by the Iowa High School Content Examination, later
called the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, designed for use with
older students. Contemporary versions of the Stanford and
Iowa scholastic achievement measures remain widely used
for group testing in elementary and secondary schools.
Individual assessment of academic skills can be traced
to the late 1930s, when Joseph Jastak (1901–1979), then
at Columbia University, became acquainted with David
Wechsler’s work on developing scales for the Wechsler-
Bellevue. Jastak came to the conclusion that fully adequate as-
sessment of cognitive functioning required supplementing
Wechsler’s scales with some measures of basic learning skills,
especially reading, writing, and calculating. To this end, he
began constructing measures that involved recognition and
pronunciation of words, a written spelling test, and a written
arithmetic test.An instrument comprising these three measures
was published as the Wide-Range Achievement Test (WRAT)
in 1946 (Jastak, 1946). Later versions of this instrument, con-
sisting of essentially the same reading, spelling, and arithmetic
tests as the original, have appeared as the WRAT-R (Jastak &
Wilkinson (1984) and the WRAT3 (Wilkinson, 1993).
In common with most of the other measures discussed in
this chapter, the WRAT has been remarkable for its longevity
and widespread use. Its normative data make it applicable for
age 5 through adulthood, and it has become a standard as-
sessment tool not only in academic settings but in clinical and
neuropsychological practice. The previously cited survey of
test usage by Camara et al. (2000) show the WRAT as the
seventh most frequently used test by clinical psychologists
and ninth most frequently used test by neuropsychologists.