Testing Children: A Practioner's Guide to Assessing Mental Development on Young Children

From The Critics

Reviewer: Gary B Kaniuk, Psy.D.(Cermak Health Services)
Description: This book designed to help clinicians in assessing children, specifically young children and infants, deals with theoretical issues, psychometrics, and application in the clinical setting.
Purpose: According to the author, "this book, based on some 40 years of practice in the testing field, aims to help practitioners derive maximum benefit from the assessment possibilities inherent in individual norm based tests of mental development thereby enabling practitioners to achieve accurate results and reach conclusions best suited to the particular needs of the child under assessment." Specifically, the author aims to provide a view of psychology essential to help users become more aware of the subjective elements of their perceptual mechanisms in the processing of received messages; identify where and how most common errors in the assessment process are likely to arise; look at channels of communication and warn of some of the pitfalls related to the user's observation skills; discuss ways to evaluate the observation of psychological functions; offer some basic information regarding the statistics required to quantify observations of performance/behavior; describe ways to avoid common mistakes form lessons learned. The book meets the author's objectives, but something is lacking because the chapters are short and contain superficial information.
Audience: According to the author, practitioners are the targeted audience but I think students in clinical psychology would be the best audience, especially those enrolled in a class of tests and measurements and/or child assessment. The author trained with Hans Eysenck and has over 40 years of experience.
Features: "The book is divided into three sections covering theory, psychometrics, and application. Although well written, the book seems to lack some basic elements one would expect from a volume covering child assessment. First, very little is actually said about specific tests (7 pages total). Report writing is covered in 6 pages. There is no index and the appendixes contain unusual information such as notes on play (1-1/2 pages, fairly superficial explanation) and illustration of the palmar view of the right hands of Primates an Homo. The best chapter in the book is chapter 11, "Some Memorable Moments During Assessments," where the author talks about poignant experiences. "
Assessment: This appears to be written for students because the information is fairly basic. I was expecting more from someone with over 40 years experience, especially since she says she is writing for practitioners. The most glaring omissions are explanations of the most common tests used for assessing children (cognitive and personality) and how to write reports. A sample report would have been extremely helpful. This is a nice introductory book for graduate or even undergraduate psychology students. Since there are so many books on this topic on the market, I would choose something more comprehensive.