Tuesday, March 31, 2020

The National Academies Press | Items in Cart

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25703/brain-health-across-the-life-span-proceedings-of-a-workshop
https://cart.nap.edu/cart/cart.php?list=fs&action=buy%20it&record_id=25703&isbn=0-309-67261-9

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Kevin S. McGrew,  PhD
Educational Psychologist
Director
Institute for Applied Psychometrics (IAP)
www.themindhub.com
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Best practices in gifted identification and assessment: Lessons from the WISC‐V - Silverman - - Psychology in the Schools - Wiley Online Library


https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pits.22361

Abstract

School psychologists in today's schools have the unique opportunity—and responsibility—to guide identification for gifted programs. "Who is gifted?" remains a perennial question in the gifted education literature, not answered by group intelligence screeners that purportedly level the playing field for all. As the student body grows more diverse, there is increasing necessity to ensure that all students have equal access to gifted programs. Failure to identify and develop the advanced abilities of gifted children who are culturally diverse, economically deprived, highly gifted, or twice exceptional is justifiably viewed as a civil rights violation. The National Association for Gifted Children's 2018 position statement, "Use of the WISC‐V for Gifted and Twice Exceptional Identification," offers important considerations for identifying the gifted. Based on a national research study of 390 gifted children on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC‐V), the statement recommends that the traditional practice of mandating Full Scale intelligence quotient scores be abandoned. Instead, it embraces the use of any one of six expanded index scores that are better measures of abstract reasoning for selecting students for gifted provisions. As gifted children are oftentimes asynchronous, alternate index scores are less biased and better able to document the strengths of all gifted children. What is learned from the WISC‐V can be applied by school psychologists to improve the choice of comprehensive individual intelligence tests, brief intelligence tests, and the body of evidence gifted children must exhibit.


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A primer on assessing intelligence in laboratory studies - ScienceDirect


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289620300180

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to provide a brief guide to major conceptual and statistical problems that are unique to the study of individual differences in intelligence and various intellectual abilities, in the context of laboratory experimental studies, and to suggest strategies to successfully navigate these problems. Such studies are generally designed so that the goal is to evaluate the relationships between individual differences in basic task performance or related markers on the one hand, and individual differences in intellectual abilities on the other hand. Issues discussed in this paper include: restriction-of-range in talent, method variance and facet theory; speed vs. power; regression to the mean; extreme-groups designs; difference scores; differences in correlations; significant vs. meaningful correlations; factor- pure tests; and criterion variables. A list of representative "do" and "don't" recommendations is provided to help guide the design and evaluation of laboratory studies.



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Saturday, March 14, 2020

Sleep and intelligence: critical review and future directions - ScienceDirect

Sleep and intelligence: critical review and future directions - ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154620300097


General cognitive ability — or intelligence — is a key psychological phenotype. Individual differences in intelligence may either cause or be a consequence of individual differences in the macrostructure of sleep, such as timing or duration. Furthermore, biological measures of sleep, especially highly trait-like sleep EEG oscillations may provide insights about the biological underpinnings of intelligence. Here we review the current state of research on the association between sleep measures and intelligence. We concluded that the macrostructure of sleep has a small but consistent correlation with intelligence, which is possibly moderated by age. Sleep spindle amplitude and possibly other sleep EEG measures are biomarkers of intelligence. We close by discussing methodological pitfalls of the field, and give recommendations for future directions.

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Kevin S. McGrew, PhD
Educational & School Psychologist
Director
Institute for Applied Psychometrics (IAP)
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Thursday, March 12, 2020

Constant Shifts between Mental States Mark a Signature of Consciousness

Constant Shifts between Mental States Mark a Signature of Consciousness
https://flip.it/PETx.L




Sunday, March 08, 2020

Worry alters speed-accuracy tradeoffs but does not impair sustained attention

Worry alters speed-accuracy tradeoffs but does not impair sustained attention
https://flip.it/mtUd3z

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Kevin S. McGrew, PhD
Educational & School Psychologist
Director
Institute for Applied Psychometrics (IAP)
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Saturday, March 07, 2020

The factor structure of cognitive functioning in cognitively healthy participants: A meta-analysis and meta-analysis of individual participant data. - PsycNET

The factor structure of cognitive functioning in cognitively healthy participants: A meta-analysis and meta-analysis of individual participant data. - PsycNET
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-07834-001

The CHC model strikes again!!!

Citation

Agelink van Rentergem, J. A., de Vent, N. R., Schmand, B. A., Murre, J. M. J., Staaks, J. P. C., & Huizenga, H. M. (2020). The factor structure of cognitive functioning in cognitively healthy participants: A meta-analysis and meta-analysis of individual participant data. Neuropsychology Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-019-09423-6

Abstract

AbstractMany neuropsychologists are of the opinion that the multitude of cognitive tests may be grouped into a much smaller number of cognitive domains. However, there is little consensus on how many domains exist, what these domains are, nor on which cognitive tests belong to which domain. This incertitude can be solved by factor analysis, provided that the analysis includes a broad range of cognitive tests that have been administered to a very large number of people. In this article, two such factor analyses were performed, each combining multiple studies. However, because it was not possible to obtain complete multivariate data on more than the most common test variables in the field, not all possible domains were examined here. The first analysis was a factor meta-analysis of correlation matrices combining data of 60,398 healthy participants from 52 studies. Several models from the literature were fitted, of which a version based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model was found to describe the correlations better than the others. The second analysis was a factor analysis of the Advanced Neuropsychological Diagnostics Infrastructure (ANDI) database, combining scores of 11,881 participants from 54 Dutch and Belgian studies not included in the first meta-analysis. Again, the model fit was better for the CHC model than for other models. Therefore, we conclude that the CHC model best characterizes both cognitive domains and which test belongs to each domain. Therefore, although originally developed in the intelligence literature, the CHC model deserves more attention in neuropsychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)


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Kevin S. McGrew, PhD
Educational & School Psychologist
Director
Institute for Applied Psychometrics (IAP)
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Thursday, March 05, 2020

Book Nook: General and Specific Mental Abilities - McFarland (Ed)-


 

Book Description

The history of testing mental abilities has seen the dominance of two contrasting approaches, psychometrics and neuropsychology. These two traditions have different theories and methodologies, but overlap considerably in the tests they use. Historically, psychometrics has emphasized the primacy of a general factor, while neuropsychology has emphasized specific abilities that are dissociable. This issue about the nature of human mental abilities is important for many practical concerns. Questions such as gender, ethnic, and age-related differences in mental abilities are relatively easy to address if they are due to a single dominant trait. Presumably such a trait can be measured with any collection of complex cognitive tests. If there are many specific mental abilities, these would be much harder to measure and associated social issues would be more difficult to resolve. The relative importance of general and specific abilities also has implications for educational practices. This book includes the diverse opinions of experts from several fields including psychometrics, neuropsychology, speech language and hearing, and applied psychology.