The standards of scaling, norming and the comparison of scale, talk about norming in psychological assessment and testing. There are different types of norms in psychological testing. The first category comprises the national norms. It looks at the characteristic variables of students from the perspective of the whole nation. Such include, age, race, sex, educational level, and the socio-economic levels of the parents (Kaplan & Saccuzzo, 2013). The other type includes the social norms that consider the variations between students who are in the same educational level. Such variations include the field a student aims at specializing in. the other type of norms include those by age and grade. These considers the age of a student and the grade that the student can be categorized. The type of norms that is called item norms is used by teachers to determine the areas in the curriculum that seem to require more emphasis. School mean norms are used by publishers to standardize content using information from the school means (AERA, 2013). User selected norms are usually generated by a school with a view to modifying school-mean norms in order to emphasize the aspects they would consider necessary. Special study norms are developed by users who have familiarized well with the group they deal with. The last type of norms is direct meaning norms. This are developed through specific techniques with a purpose of providing a meaning to scores (NCME, 1999).

The development of tests is done systematically and is a process that is developed overtime as assessments are done. For example, after considering the national and the local norms, the user can modify the considerations made so that the norms fit the group well. This will depend on the familiarization that a user has with a particular group.

References

American Educational Research Association (AERA). (2013). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. ISBN: 9780935302257.

Kaplan, R.M., & Saccuzzo, DP., (2013). Psychological testing: Principles, applications, and issues (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage.

National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. National Council on Measurement in Education