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The development and promotion of social-emotional skills in childhood and adolescence contributes to subsequent well-being and positive life outcomes. However, the assessment of these skills is associated with conceptual and methodological challenges. This review discusses how social-emotional skill measurement in youth could be improved in terms of skills’ conceptualization and classification, and in terms of assessment techniques and methodologies. The first part of the review discusses various conceptualizations of social-emotional skills, demonstrates their overlap with related constructs such as emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality dimensions, and proposes an integrative set of social-emotional skill domains that has been developed recently. Next, methodological approaches that are innovative and may improve social-emotional assessments are presented, illustrated by concrete examples. We discuss how these innovations could advance social-emotional assessments, and demonstrate links to similar issues in related fields. We conclude the review by providing several concrete assessment recommendations that follow from this discussion.

Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to review some of the key literature on response time as it has played a role in cognitive ability measurement, providing a historical perspective as well as covering current research. We discuss the speed-level distinction, dimensions of speed and level in cognitive abilities frameworks, speed-accuracy tradeoff, approaches to addressing speed-accuracy tradeoff, analysis methods, particularly item response theory-based, response time models from cognitive psychology (ex-Gaussian function, and the diffusion model), and other uses of response time in testing besides ability measurement. We discuss several new methods that can be used to provide greater insight into the speed and level aspects of cognitive ability and speed-accuracy tradeoff decisions. These include item-level time limits, the use of feedback (e.g., CUSUMs), explicit scoring rules that combine speed and accuracy information (e.g., count down timing), and cognitive psychology models. We also review some of the key psychometric advances in modeling speed and level, which combine speed and ability measurement, address speed-accuracy tradeoff, allow for distinctions between response times on items responded to correctly and incorrectly, and integrate psychometrics with information-processing modeling. We suggest that the application of these models and tools is likely to advance both the science and measurement of human abilities for theory and applications.

This research assessed the effects of aptitude, strategy training, and item characteristics on the strategic processes employed in the performance of spatial visualization tasks. A pilot study demonstrated that three item characteristics accounted for most of the variation in item difficulty in a paper-folding task: number of folds, number of obscured folds, and number of asymmetric folds. Retrospective reports suggested that subjects employed two strategies when attempting to solve these items: a visualization strategy and an analytic strategy. In the main experiment, these two strategies were demonstrated via motion picture models; 24 subjects received visualization training, and 24 received analytic training. Training effects of the demonstration films were compared with a performance feedback condition given to eight subjects. All subjects performed 74 paper-folding items and 60 surface development transfer items following treatment. Error and latency data suggested that the treatments affected strategy selection and efficiency during performance of the paper-folding task and the transfer task. Treatment effects were shown to depend on the subject's aptitude profile and on the characteristics of items. Sex differences were also noted. Implications for a process theory of human abilities are discussed.