Experience
The Why and How of first-hand experience with psychological assessment.
While testing in general is seen everywhere in our society, our exposure to real life psychological tests may be quite limited. Exposure to psychological testing is very important to students in psychology, regardless of their field of interest. In the class textbook Mastering Modern Psychological Testing it says
“For those interested in clinical, counselling, or school psychology, research has shown that psychological assessment is surpassed only by psychotherapy in terms of professional importance”.
If psychological assessment is going to play an important part in our careers in the field of psychology, exposure to it is an important part of our education. Taking this class is a good exposure to psychological tests, but first hand-experience is also valuable.
Psychology students can get experience with psychological testing by joining the human participant pool. This gives students an opportunity to be a participant in a research study, or in some cases be the subject of a psychological test. Experiencing what is like to be given a psychological test gives students an interesting and unique opportunity to be on the other side of an experimenter-participant interaction.
Furthermore, students who are participants once debriefed about the research hypothesis and purpose of the study get the opportunity to ask the experimenter questions about the experiment itself and the research. For students interested in pursuing research or psychological testing, this is a very special opportunity to talk to the experimenter, usually a graduate student, about what research or testing is like, and how they first got involved. They could really provide a lot of insight for psychology students, or other students interested related fields.
In my own experiences with the participant pool, I once had the opportunity to take part in various tests of memory and intelligence. My experimenter were alone in a room 1 on 1 for a couple hours, as I performed various tests (some of which I recognized from Kirsten’s presentation on the WAIS). I also wish that I got to see the results of this test, because I found the tasks very interesting! Unfortunately when participating in the subject pool we often do not get to hear back about the results of the testing or research.
Psychological assessment is a growing field with a lot of job opportunities. Sometimes exposure to things like research and psychological tests are rare, especially in the first years of your undergraduate program. While most students only take part in the subject participant pool for extra credit, this kind of exposure really has so much value.
Student Number: 260510305
