Placentation Research - Meng Hu's Blog

CHAPTER 5
examiner than a bunch of test scores, and a psychologist’s experience
with a test is an invaluable commodity that cannot be
overlooked. A new test may have great promise as a measure of
intelligence steeped in a solid theoretical foundation, but you
just can’t bypass the time factor—the time it takes for examiners
to get a clinical “feel” for specific subtests and test items, and the
time that must go by to allow research studies to accumulate.
The clinical lessons that I learned by working with Mc-
Carthy and Wechsler, and that Nadeen learned during her graduate
training in one of the first psycho-educational clinics in
the world, at Columbia University, shaped many of the decisions
that we made when developing our own tests. Consider
our Word Order subtest: The examiner names common objects
(“horn—kite—tree—ship”) and then shows pictures of these objects;
the child has to point to the pictures in the order in which
they were named. For more difficult items, the child has to rapidly
name pictures of colors before being allowed to point to
the objects that were named. This color interference task shows
whether the child can recall things despite distraction. It’s even
difficult for adults. I learned that when our son James (then age
6, and called Jamie) spontaneously administered some Word
Order items to me while I was working at my desk. Though I
said, “Jamie, leave me alone, I’m busy,” he persisted and soon
had me rapidly naming colors while I groped to remember the
lists of objects he had named. Now I understood exactly what the
standardization examiners meant when they complained that
the color-naming task frustrated a lot of children and confused
some, and was absolutely demonic for rigid individuals who had
trouble adapting to a sudden change in tasks.
Nadeen and I had been contemplating getting rid of the
color interference task and finding another way to construct difficult
Word Order items—until Jamie gave me the test. That experience
immediately reminded me of Wechsler’s admonition that
IQ tests must be clinically sensitive. Nadeen and I agreed right
then and there to keep the colors and not rob examiners of the
built-in chance to observe a child’s flexibility versus rigidity, and
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