Essentials of Processing Assessment by Milton J. Dehn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There’s not much to say too much about a textbook. Or in this case, a guide to the various kinds of assessments of human potential/capability.
It’s interesting that the rationality of psychology in the area of assessment would echo itself in terms of tests. While Dehn is careful to say that these tests don’t mean anything in themselves — that capability is a relative term — what we see here is the fragmentation of assessment as the ability to recount, move and process material difference. Different kinds of processing is tested differently, as though this is all that a human being is. The coherency of intelligence per se, may be found in fluid intelligence or g but these are admittedly difficult to test. We are more comfortable with mechanical tasks in terms of accuracy and speed as those are easily rated and compared.
The overall picture though, of an assessor as scientist, is not to judge but to try to reconstruct from the fragmented volley of tests the individuals entire capability. As Dehn pushes this philosophy of a unified human mind, he also remarks that often it’s not necessary to envelope a subject with the endless number of tests to be taken. We should only test when we think there is a need to help a subject do better in a subject matter or with social issues.
While this is directly applicable to school, this ends up being entirely applicable to our human condition. We want everyone to be calibrated properly, to excel. A nation of healthy minds to do what we need to do. This is not a bad ideal but its negative quality, that of degrading what cannot be tested, what cannot be captured, of ignoring potentials that are not easily capturable through rout rationalisation is not a good thing.
This is not a heavily critical book, but as such, it reveals the undercurrent of its own judgement by trying to be as faithful to what we need processing assessment for, and how we ought to utilize it for the good of the subject.
Of course, we should not shrink from doing what we think is best, of doing what we can for others, just because we might hurt them in ways that we cannot yet understand.
All in all, an interesting reflection of how justifiable fallibilism is possible given the way a field of knowledge wraps itself in terms of how it knows what it knows through its own immanent metrics.
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