I spent the night with...

Made you look! I know, I'm getting shameless about using catchy/sexy titles to my posts just to get people to check out the blogage! It's cheesy-but it seems to work. However, I've done it two days in a row and that's about all the play I'm going to get so, here's the punch line...I spent the night with David Wechsler.

The sorta creepy thing is...he passed away years ago! Actually I spent the night with his test, not him personally. But I did learn an awful lot about him and his work during the course of our evening together!

 Now you get the real skinny...I sat up all night studying this very complex test for my presentation at class. It's called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales and it's the gold standard of intelligence tests. Referred to affectionately as the WAIS-III, this test and the Stanford-Binet are the most widely recognized and used intelligence tests in the world today. Remember the post awhile back about the unbearable psych testing class I'm in? My own therapist was generous enough to allow me to use his set. These tests cost about $1000 to purchase so this was a really big thing. He threatened to chop off my tongue and poke out my eyes if I lost any of the little pieces-so I was very careful! Anyway, I started reading all the documentation and test manuals and looking at all the different subtests included in this scale. Turns out it's really cool and I learned a ton and actually had fun doing it! Go figure-last week this subject was making me a little nuts in a negative whiny sort of way. See there, it doesn't pay to judge things or people without getting all the relevant 4-1-1. This guy was an incredible pioneer in his field, trained by the best psychologists of his era, and spent his entire professional life doing this work!I'm glad he did. That way, I don't have to look into it! I can just pay my $1000 dollars someday when I'm a grown-up therapist and get my very own WAIS! Gee, I love a passionate man-even if he is dead! I'm getting kind of obsessed about him, actually. David Wechsler was ecological in the way he viewed human beings. Even though David Wechsler developed this intelligence test, he was committed to the idea that humans are so much more than what a test can measure and that other elements should be taken into consideration when working with people. He was an innovator in this thinking that personality traits factor into the measure of intelligence. He was sort of the father of the Emotional IQ movement. David Wechsler developed these beliefs into one of the most reliable standardized group of scales which I'm sure have helped a lot of individuals down through the years! I always feel that we need to honor and acknowledge those who contribute to our excellence. I think David Wechsler really did. The tests consist of verbal and performance tasks-there are picture completion tasks where you try to find out what's missing in the picture-remember how fun that was in those hidden pictures in the Highlights magazine? Yeah, some of these ones are pretty hard. But they are fun. Then there's a set of blocks where you have a certain amount of time to make specific patterns. That was too much like a Rubic's cube-made my brain hurt!

Those were really tough and I didn't get very many of those right. There were some timed puzzles and there were picture cards that told a story but you had to sequence them in the right order. It was fascinating stuff! Over the years the test has undergone revision to update the information and pictures to keep it current and generationally unbiased. All of the information is normed-which means that it comes from a knowledge base that is common and accessible to the majority of the population. There are surveys and sample groups and consultants and neuropsychologists, school, and clinical psychologists who collect and analyze the data for these scales. Age, ethnicity, geographical location and educational level are all proportionally represented to eliminate as much bias from the exam as possible.It's a huge undertaking. There are stats up the ying-yang about it too if you're into that kind of thing. Administering the test is a very precise procedure and scoring is pretty involved as is the evaluation of the test scores. The test itself takes about 75-90 minutes. After you've taken it, you feel exhausted-like someone sucked out your brain!!

Even David Wechsler admitted that no test is 100% accurate and no test will show completely a person's true ability. Tests are tools to be used to help further people-not lable! Here's a neat quote: "Intelligence is the capacity of an individual to understand the world about him and his resourcefulness to cope with it's challenges~David Wechsler, 1974
Ok-so now you've gotten a graduate level lesson for free-what a deal! Hey, if anyone out there has taken the WAIS, please post a comment and let me what your experience was like...
And yes, I spend the night with dead guys-get over it!!