COUN 6360 Week 6 Mental Measurements Yearbook Review Example

What Independent Reviewers Saw That the Manual Did Not Say: A Mental Measurements Yearbook Review for an Adult Achievement Battery Under Consideration, Checking the Edition, Summarizing Two Reviews in the Author's Own Words and Lining Their Judgments Up Against the Manual's Claims

Student Name

Walden University

COUN 6360: Assessment in Counseling and Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Independent Reviewers Saw That the Manual Did Not Say: A Mental Measurements Yearbook Review for an Adult Achievement Battery Under Consideration, Checking the Edition, Summarizing Two Reviews in the Author's Own Words and Lining Their Judgments Up Against the Manual's Claims

Sources and Edition

The battery now under review would be used with Mr. Ortega, the composite client whose norm fit was examined in Week 5. The Mental Measurements Yearbook publishes independent, critical reviews of commercially available tests, typically two per test, written by reviewers with no connection to the publisher. For this assignment, the two reviews summarized below are composites modeled on the Yearbook's review format and do not reproduce any published review; in a real file, each would carry its full citation, including the reviewer's name, the Yearbook edition and the entry number. The volume consulted for the format is the twenty-first Yearbook (Carlson et al., 2021).

The first step in any Yearbook check is to confirm that the reviewed edition matches the edition under consideration. In this case the Yearbook reviews concern the battery's current edition, the same one the counselor would order. Had they reviewed the previous edition, their judgments about norms and reliability would not have applied, since a new edition typically brings new norms.

The First Review

The first reviewer, a measurement specialist, praised the battery's breadth, its clear administration directions and its large, stratified norm sample. She doubted two things. She found the reliability evidence for the shortest subtests thin, noting that the manual reported internal consistency but little evidence of stability over time for those subtests. And she judged the validity evidence for interpreting differences between subtests to be weaker than the manual implied, because the manual offered few studies relating subtest differences to real-world outcomes.

The Second Review

The second reviewer, a school psychologist, praised the battery's usefulness in practice and its scoring software. Her main concern was fairness: the manual reported that the norm sample matched census figures for race and ethnicity, but offered little evidence about how examinees whose first language was not English performed, and no analysis of whether items functioned differently for them.

Comparing the Reviews With the Manual

Both reviewers agreed with the manual that the battery is carefully built and widely usable. Where they found the manual's evidence thinner than its prose suggested was on interpreting differences between subtests and on fairness for examinees like Mr. Ortega. Whiston (2017) advises counselors to use independent reviews precisely to catch this kind of gap between a publisher's claims and its evidence.

Table 1

Reviewers' Judgments Set Against the Manual's Claims

Judgments are summarized in the author's own words from the composite reviews described above.

The Reviewers' Vantage

The first reviewer writes from measurement research and attends closely to technical evidence; the second writes from school practice and attends to usability and fairness for the students she serves. Neither works with adult learners in workforce settings, so neither addressed the battery's fit for an older adult entering training. That gap is itself useful information.

Implications for This Client

The reviews support using the battery's reading and math subtests to describe Mr. Ortega's current skills, while treating any comparison between his subtests cautiously and reporting the limits of the norms for second-language learners. They also suggest asking the publisher whether any studies of adult second-language learners exist. Drummond et al. (2016) recommend combining independent reviews with the manual and with the test user's own judgment of fit, which is what the next weeks will do.

References

Carlson, J. F., Geisinger, K. F., & Jonson, J. L. (Eds.). (2021). The twenty-first mental measurements yearbook. Buros Center for Testing.

Drummond, R. J., Sheperis, C. J., & Jones, K. D. (2016). Assessment procedures for counselors and helping professionals (8th ed.). Pearson.

Whiston, S. C. (2017). Principles and applications of assessment in counseling (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.