Historical Precursors and Early Testing Theory

Although Construct validity theory (CVT) did not formally enter the scene until psychology was into its eighth decade as an established independent discipline, it might be argued that the history of test-related validity as an area of scholarship is as old as the discipline itself. That is to say, the story of the history of disciplinary psychology is in many ways a story about psychological measurement, about attempts to represent psychological attributes quantitatively and then determine whether, and the extent to which, particular quantitative representations constitute “good” measurements of the psychological attribute in question. As was noted in the introductory chapter, early approaches to mental testing generally presupposed that quantitative representations of psychological attributes are, in principle, reasonable and legitimate and, thus, early testing theory was not really concerned with providing explicit theories 2