The Science of Human Behavior, Measured.
Say you’ve found a well-validated English questionnaire, a depression scale, a personality inventory, a measure of job satisfaction, and you want to use it in your own country, in your own language. The obvious first move is to translate it. Get a good translator, convert the items, and start collecting data. This is exactly the … Read more
If you’ve studied statistics in a psychology program, you learned classical test theory, even if nobody called it that. Reliability, Cronbach’s alpha, total scores, item-total correlations: all of it belongs to the classical framework. It’s the water most researchers swim in. But there’s another framework, one that underlies nearly all modern large-scale testing – the … Read more
A student takes a national exam and scores 75 out of 100. The number appears on their certificate, determines their university options, and follows them for years. It looks precise. It looks final. It looks like a fact about the student, in the same way that their height or weight is a fact. It isn’t. … Read more
When we talk about teaching and learning technology, most conversations circle around a few big names. Google Classroom is everywhere in schools. Coursera and edX dominate the online course market. Universities run their own learning management systems, often locked-down platforms that faculty and students learn to tolerate rather than love. But there’s another option that … Read more
Imagine a test where the questions you see depend on how well you’re doing. Get an item right, and the next item gets harder. Get it wrong, and the next one gets easier. The test calibrates itself to you, in real time, item by item, narrowing in on your true ability with each response. This … Read more
Every test, every scale, every measurement instrument in psychology and education starts with the same humble unit: the item. A single question, a single statement, a single decision point. Get the items right, and your measurement has a chance. Get them wrong, and no amount of sophisticated statistics will save you. Yet item writing is … Read more
If you teach, you give tests. Quizzes, midterms, finals, classroom assessments. They’re a core part of how we measure what students have learned. But here’s a question most teachers never ask: how good are your tests, actually? Most assessment in education is built on intuition. A teacher writes questions that seem fair, grades the results, … Read more
If you do research that involves collecting data from human participants, and most psychology research does, you need a survey platform. Most people default to Google Forms because it’s free and familiar. Some go to commercial tools like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey because their institution pays for them. A few build custom solutions in code. I … Read more
Imagine I bring a bathroom scale into the room and tell you it measures height. You’d laugh. The instrument is wrong for the construct. It doesn’t matter how precise the scale is, how consistent its readings are, or how trustworthy the brand is, if I’m using it to measure height, I’m wrong. Now imagine I … Read more
If you’ve ever taken a personality quiz online – one of those “Which Harry Potter character are you?” tests, or a viral “What does your favorite color say about you?” quiz – you’ve engaged with something that looks like psychological assessment but isn’t. These quizzes are entertainment. They have no scientific basis, no validated psychometric … Read more