Reassessing Assessment

By Jim McCollum, Spring 2010

Gary Groth-Marnat, PhD, is the author of the Handbook for Psychological Assessment, which most psychology students read at one point during their graduate careers. When he spoke at Alliant last semester, he presented an assessment “wishlist,” which if granted would, in his opinion, improve the quality of clinical assessment through both practice and research.

During his presentation, Groth-Marnat covered five broad issues: creating the optimal psychological report, actuarial prediction, assessment and treatment planning, revising the Rorschach, and technological advances that could benefit assessment. Areas of assessment where he sees room for improvement among clinicians and students include report readability, connecting interpretations to the context in which the client exists, the integration of interpretations, highlighting client strengths, and providing a stronger link between referral questions and recommendations. One of the hurdles that block optimal reports, Groth-Marnat stated, are writing reports to please a professor or supervisor, not to best serve the needs of the client.

Groth-Marnat illustrated his points about report writing with a discussion of suitable doctoral dissertation topics. He suggested studies that would examine the manner in which clients receive and respond to different aspects of assessment reports, such as how they rate report length, how they rate integrated vs. non-integrated reports, the impact of strength inclusion, and the impact of receiving feedback at all. Other dissertation ideas he put forward incorporated how psychologists choose to utilize assessments, how they use computers as assessment instruments, decision and patterns regarding inclusion or exclusion test scores, and how psychologists integrate data into reports, if at all.