Vocabulary Testing

The point made by Anastasi 94-001) is most timely. A distressingly high percentage of psychologists still are at the mass stage, developmentally speaking, in their perception of intelligence tests and intelligence testing. Simple differentiations are woefully infrequent in evidence. Many educators have employed Wechsler Performance scores, in their "predictive" thinking, as though they "said" the same thing as the Verbal scores. Articles tend often to be accepted for publication, and the research on which they were based too often to be directed, reflecting an assumption that a vocabulary test is a vocabulary test is a vocabulary test--where scores on, say, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test are taken, at least implicitly, to reflect the same phenomenon as do scores on the Binet vocabulary test, or on a multiple-choice type of vocabulary test. No apparent awareness is in evidence of a sensitivity to a difference between the identification of pictures and verbal labels, the verbal production of definitions, and/or the recognition of verbal equivalents or similarities. Also, psychologists who have been trained primarily with or on adults, with respect to whom IQs can have certain limited value, tend to think of children in similar terms when in reality even a good IQ has very limited value to the elementary class teacher. This studious impoverishment of test information is further perpetuated by group test publishers who refrain from providing level scores that could be of help to elementary level teachers.