Submission of Assessment and Instructions for Completing the Assignment

This assignment should be submitted electronically. It should be submitted online via Turnitin by the given deadline. You will find a Turnitin link on the module’s eLP (Blackboard) site in the Assessments folder. The link is labelled as ‘PY0793 Individual Differences and Psychometrics Integrated Assignment’ and says ‘SUBMIT YOUR FINAL ASSIGNMENT HERE’ underneath it. It must be formatted as a Microsoft word document (.doc) or a PDF. Submissions will not be accepted via any other means. If you do not submit your assignment using the designated online assignment submission tool on Blackboard, it will be treated as a non-submission leading to a failed assessment.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your assignment arrives before the submission deadline stated above. See the University policy on late submission of work below. It is also your responsibility to ensure you obtain proof from Turnitin confirming your
submission. When you successfully submit to Turnitin you will see a screen that states Submission Complete! You will see your submitted assignment after the Submission Complete! screen disappears. You are advised to click the digital receipt icon to
download a digital receipt. This receipt is a record and evidence of your submission date and time. This is what you will need to produce if there is any query about your submission (including date and time) and where it was submitted to. Your digital
receipt will not be automatically emailed to you. If you do not have this digital receipt from Turnitin assume your work has not been successfully submitted.

You have to choose ONE of the following options:

An Educational Psychologist employed by a local consortium of council education authorities, the Northumbria Education Consortium (NEC), has approached you as an expert in individual differences, to write a report on the efficacy of cognitive interventions for adults with challenging learning behaviours. They were particularly impressed by these press-released comments by Stojanoski, et al., (2021).

“The promise of brain training is appealing: completing online “games” targeting certain cognitive systems, such as attention and memory, will result in global improvements in cognitive functioning, and even IQ.” NEC would like you to write a 5000-word report to them which:

A) Critically considers the relevant psychological research in terms of working memory (WM) intervention and its impact upon fluid intelligence (Guideline: 3000 words)

B) Provides guidance to the psychologist on the development of their new psychometric measure. Specifically, the consortium would like you to carry out a psychometric assessment of a measure of non-verbal fluid intelligence, the NEC Test of Intelligence (NECTI), which they have recently started to develop, for use in an adult education context, to assess the impact of their WM
intervention. In this component of your report, you should first provide the consortium with guidance on developing a good psychometric measure and then explicitly consider the reliability and validity of their new intelligence measure, based on the information that they have provided (Guideline: 2000 words)

Instructions For Completing The Assessment

The NEC Test of Intelligence (NECTI) consists of 30-items involving short tasks such as matrices reasoning, where patterns vary in a matrix and you have to identify the rules for the changes; cube task where a flat 2 dimensional pattern is presented and you have to identify- the 3-D cube object which can be constructed from the pattern; 3-D mental rotation, where you have to mentally image the rotation of an object and you have to identify its appearance after the mental rotation; and an object assembly task, where you are given multiple parts of an object and you have to construct the object from its parts. To test the reliability and validity of this new measure, 500 participants were asked to complete several relevant measures:

NECTI Time1 measure, a measure of NECTI taken in the initial phase of the assessment process,

NECTI Time2 measure, a measure of NECTI taken 12 weeks after the NECTI Time1 measure,

Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM, Burke, 1972), a measure of non-verbal fluid intelligence taken in the initial phase of the assessment process,

The Empathy Quotient questionnaire (EQ, Allison et al., 2011), a measure of autistic-like personality traits known to be important for how well an individual socially interacts with others, taken in the initial phase of the assessment process, The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT, Mauger & Kolmodin, 1975), a measure of performance in educational assessment, this was given 6 months after the NECTI Time1 measure.

ASSESSMENT MARKING CRITERIA AND RUBRIC

The assessment criteria (used in conjunction with the marking rubric) for this assignment.

You are advised to structure your report clearly with subheadings and the writing style should be appropriate for an academic audience which lacks expertise in psychometrics.

1) a critical consideration of the general nature/nurture debate in the context of intelligence
2) a brief consideration of the working memory and intelligence research and theoretical literature
3) a critical consideration of the working memory and intelligence intervention research literature

1) a critical consideration of the features associated with a sound psychometric measure
2) a critical evaluation of the usefulness of the psychometric information provided by NEC
3) a consideration of the further psychometric information that you would require in order to make a
complete evaluation of the NECTI

Tips for Part B
You may want to consider the following points before writing your guidance on the development of a new psychometric measure:

1 Why it is important to use well-validated psychometric measures.
2 What would you look for in a good measure of non-verbal fluid intelligence for use in an adult education context.
3 Why test developers administer additional measures to participants during the test validation process and what do you look for when deciding whether these additional measures are ‘fit for purpose’ When evaluating the NECTI, you might want to consider the points below:
4 Based on the information that you have available, what can you say about the reliability of the NECTI? Is any information about the reliability of the measure missing? Why would it be beneficial to have access to this additional data in making your psychometric evaluation?
5 What does the relationship between the NECTI and RPM tell you about the convergent validity of the new measure?
6 What does the relationship between the NECTI and EQ tell you about the discriminant validity of the new measure?
7 What does the relationship between the NECTI and EQ tell you about the discriminant validity of the new measure?
8 What does the relationship between the NECTI and SAT tell you about the predictive validity of the new measure?
9 Based on all of the information that you have available, what can you say about the validity of the NECTI? Is any information about the validity of the measure missing? Why would it be beneficial to have access to this additional data in making your psychometric evaluation?