The development and application of a computerized information-processing test battery

Abstract

To bridge the gap between computerized testing and information-processing-based measurement, a battery of computerized information-processing based ability and preference measures was developed. The information-processing and preference measures and a battery of paper-and-pencil tests were administered to 64 college students. Although the internal-consistency reliabilities of the computerized information-processing measures were adequate, test-retest reliabilities were lower than desirable for ability measures. The computerized information-processing measures possessed moderate convergent validity but had low correlations with traditional paper-and-pencil measures. Of the computerized preference measures, the most promising results were obtained with the Stimulus Pace measure. A major problem with the use of the computerized information-processing measures in applied settings would be administration time, as the battery took approximately 4 hours. In addition, problems with the stability of results over time and substantial practice effects suggest that even longer testing sessions would be required to obtain reliable measures. Although information-processing measures of short-term memory have, at best, low correlations with traditional intelligence tests, their ability to predict real-world tasks has yet to be sufficiently researched.