Psychometrics and Psychological Tests

This chapter is devoted to describing the notables of psychometrics and psychological testing and how their efforts contributed to quantification. By this point, quantification is decidedly moving into realms of psychology and sociology. This chapter focuses on the largest evidence for this: educational testing and psychological testing. It addresses the very personal nature of such tests, and cites many kinds of such test, including in the cognitive behavioral and psychomotor domains. A very brief introduction to reliability and validity is given, with a focus on psychometric analyses. Most of the chapter is devoted to describing the contributions of four individuals who were instrumental to founding modern testing: Francis Galton, Wilhelm Wundt, James McKeen Cattell, and Alfred Binet.