Annotated Bibliography for Chris Riedel's Second Quarter Website Project

Hunt, M. (1993).  The Story of Psychology.  New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

 This book had a lot of the information I used in the history section of my site.  All of the information I used came from the chapter called "The Measurers," from page 208 to page 241.  The chapter's first two sections were devoted entirely to Galton and Binet but included a lot of personal biography as well as relevant information to my topic.  The background did give a very good impression of both men, however.  The rest of the chapter explored the early adoption of the IQ test system into the US, including some background for Goddard and Terman.  The information was corroborated by my other sources and serves as the basis for the first half of my history page.

Unfortunately, the book, although recently published, did not really include any information from after the 1937 revision of the Stanford-Binet, virtually nothing about Wechsler's test, and did not include any information on the theory behind intelligence testing, only briefly measuring Spearmen, and not including any later theories.  I was surprised the book had been published so recently.  The information within was almost entirely historical with very few definitions and little explanation of the science of intelligence testing.

Kaplan, R., & Saccuzzo, D. (1997).  Psychological Testing: Principles, Applications, and Issues (4^th ed.).  Pacific Grove, CA:  Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

 This book was organized like a textbook, and was very well organized and structured in such a way that I could read only what I needed for the basic concepts of my site.  There was a brief but relatively complete history section that supplemented the information I already had, including a look at the development of intelligence testing with the idea of Darwinian evolution as a psychological school of thought.  More importantly, there was a very well organized and specific chapter about the history of the Binet IQ test, which significantly added to my history section because it contained an up-to-date description of all four revisions of the Stanford-Binet test, how they differed from one another, and what improvements were added each time the test was revised.  The text was supplemented with schematic figures that helped explain the relationships.

The book also contained a glossary of terms from throughout the book that helped me greatly with my own glossary, as I paraphrased many of the definitions.  However, the text did not include very much about the statistics involved with the test, but was focused on developing and administering tests.  Both intelligence and personality tests were covered, so a large portion of the information in the book was not useful to me.

The book also had a section on the legal aspects of psychological testing and a large section devoted to investigating test bias, which I would like to go back and look at in depth if I have time in the future.  The book was very detailed and had too much information for me to integrate some of the information that might have been very useful to me.

Murphy, K., & Davidshofer, C. (1998).  Psychological Testing: Principles and Applications (4^th ed.).  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

This book was designed to be a college level textbook and so contained a lot more information than I was capable of using on my site.  The book did not have much information on the historical aspects of intelligence testing, but did have critical discussions throughout, which was useful for someone reading straight through the text but difficult for me to find and use concisely.  One such critical discussion included a summary of The Bell Curve by Hernstein and Murray and some of the debate surrounding its findings.  Each chapter also had a glossary at the end, but these were not indexed so it was much more difficult to use.

This book was most useful in explaining the statistics involved in psychological testing, and I referred to this book for each of the explanations on my concepts page.  It was especially of help in explaining the technical aspects of the equations for linear regression and standard deviation.  However, the amount of detail also made it difficult to get through.  This text also was devoted to both intelligence and personality testing, but focused more on the testing process itself and only spent a few chapters on specific types of tests.  This was useful to me because it gave me the details I needed for my explanations of the statistical techniques on my concepts page, but did not elaborate much on intelligence tests specifically.

Plucker, J., Johnson, J. (1998).  History of Influences in the Development of Intelligence Theory and Testing.  Retrieved 12/13/01 from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/index.html.

This website is attractive and well designed.  It was well structured and included interactive maps that gave the reader a chance to see the information in different formats.  The authors primarily organized the resources by individual, although a “Hot Topics” section goes into detail about several theories, concepts, and historic examples of intelligence testing.  Specifically, the site explores the issues of the controversy surrounding bell curve, the recent trends of the bell curve, such as the Flynn Effect, and several newly posted pages of information about recent findings.

This website, however, is mostly dedicated to the history of intelligence testing.  The information is well researched, if not very in-depth, and goes back much further than my other sources and includes some information about the historical roots of psychology in general.  The biographies of individuals were short, but the site was organized to show relationships such as student/teacher connections and whose ideas impacted who.  The biographies also included pertinent dates and other details that helped me when organizing and checking my history page.  There was also a picture of each historic individual, and I used several of those pictures to help break up the text of my history page.

Created by Chris Riedel, January 2002

Designed for Mrs. Hannah's AP Psychology Class, third period, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology