Setting the cutting-edge agenda in applied psychological assessment
The Psychometrics Centre
The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge is an international centre of excellence in psychological, occupational, clinical and educational assessment.
'Psychometrics' often implies psychometric testing, but also provides scientific principles for fair, accurate examination systems, for clinical diagnosis and for recruitment techniques such as interviews and assessment centres. These underlie crucial decisions in education, human resources, health provision and psychological treatment.
Our centre exists because:
- assessment demands high standards from educationists, business managers, policy makers, clinicians, researchers and psychologists;
- bad assessment damages individuals, organisations and the credibility of academic work;
- globalisation and new technology are creating new assessment needs.
Our range of training, consultancy and support services supports anyone designing or implementing assessment systems.
The psychometric tradition
Classical psychometrics began in
Contemporary psychometrics
Psychometric testing is today experiencing a period of explosive growth in new theoretical approaches, analytical techniques and areas of application. Psychometricians work in health care and biomedical research where they investigate diagnostic testing procedures, particularly for psychiatric or borderline conditions but also for physical illness (cancer); in human resources and talent management departments and in test publishers, where they devise ability tests and personality questionnaires for fair and accurate assessment of staff for recruitment, career guidance, coaching, staff development and team building; in education, where they work in special needs identification and in designing, evaluating and improving examination systems; in security, where they innovate with character profiling approaches that have come to form an important part of forensic science and fraud detection; and in epidemiology, where they analyse datasets from large scale government, NHS and national surveys.
Careers in educational, psychological, forensic and clinical assessment
A worldwide shortage of expertise in the areas of educational and psychological testing has been a source of concern at government level in the United States, where providing expertise for the 'No Child Left Behind' program has been a problem. The massive expansion in available databases, coinciding with advances in statistical modeling techniques such as binary and ordinal factor analysis, item response theory, structural regression, mixture models and multilevel modeling, made possible by the latest computer capacities represented by programs such as MPlus, Stata, R and Latent Gold, have led to an escalation of interest in this new field and an increased demand for psychometricians. Data collection through the internet, on line testing, item-banking of questionnaires and multidisciplinary collaboration are just a few of the themes that enrich the emerging field of translational psychometrics. Methodology courses in the social sciences are being revamped to take account of new conceptual frameworks and to train a new breed of quantitative social scientists who excel at measurement theory, and apply these to study and solve societal problems.
Most psychometricians have a first degree in psychology or in another social science. Others are qualified in occupational psychology or have carried out research within another discipline and are seeking a psychometric qualification. However the quantitative nature of modern psychometrics means that it also attracts those with a first degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, economics and other quantitative social sciences who are looking for a career change. Training in psychological assessment is also a good grounding for careers in organisational psychology, educational psychology, forensic psychology or educational assessment.
Assessment and diversity
Barriers are breaking down between formerly discrete disciplines as methodologies escape from their discipline of origin. Econometricians are analysing the same psychosocial and socio-demographic data as psychometricians, and biostatisticians are examining the same databases as those specialising in quality of life. Educational assessment professionals are data-mining their vaults of examination results, while educational statisticians and risk assessors are experimenting with neural networks and other pattern recognition techniques from artificial intelligence to classify and characterise huge databases of textual information for quantification and meaning.
But diversity is as much about society as about being interdisciplinary. Today, it is the multicultural and diverse cities and universities of the world that are also becoming the crucibles of new technology. The past association of classical psychometrics with eugenics and IQ testing has led to a very noticeable shortage of psychometric experts from ethnic minorities in the West throughout the past century, a shortage that is only now being remedied by the huge increase in training programmes in China, India, the Caribbean and the Gulf. It is an important part of our mission to ensure that psychometrics never again becomes the preserve of a clique of narrowly based intellectuals. In Cambridge the Centre draws together measurement professionals from Social and Political Sciences, Psychiatry, Experimental Psychology, Social and Developmental Psychology, Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, the Faculty of Education, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Arts and Humanities and the Judge Business School, and reaches out to collaborative partners in the USA, India, China, and elsewhere.