In this article, we present and argue our assertion that current routine psychological testing of individuals is not valid. To support our assertion, we review the concept of ergodicity, Birkhoff's theorem, and Molenaar's manifesto, which together support our contention that the direct transposition of population estimations for producing inferences about the individual is not valid. We argue that this practice of direct transposition is the root cause of why routine psychological testing of individual is not valid. We then provide an example of a common application of psychological testing of an individual, explaining why this practice is not valid. Finally, we discuss how the intraindividual (or within-person) approach provides some prospect for valid individual testing and also introduces new challenges. We hope that our questioning of current psychological testing practices motivates researchers to propose and study novel methodological propositions to address the issues raised by our assertion.

This preprint shows initial evidence that the complexity cost criterion may not be a good approach in the regression tree method

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The theory of students’ approaches to learning makes direct contributions to the teaching-learning process. For instance, it provides a conceptual repertoire that helps improve the teacher’s pedagogical practice and the student’s self-assessment of their own learning. Despite its contributions, the field of approaches has an important limitation: the measurement of its constructs is carried out exclusively by self-report tests. Although these measures have brought advances to the field, self-report is permeated by important biases that impair the quality of measurement. Considering this limitation, the Laboratory for Cognitive Architecture Research (LAICO) has initiated an agenda to develop performance-based tests for the measurement of approaches. The Approach-in-Process Test Version 2 is part of this agenda. It is a performance-based test that measures approach in the context of school/academic learning. In addition to the performance-based measurement, the test has two self-report measurements. The first measures the student’s perception of the impact of certain lessons on his or her deep approach to learning. The second measures the student’s perception of how often he or she manifests the deep approach to learning. The test items for the self-report measurements are multiple choice, while the items for the performance measure are open-ended in nature and require a correction guide. This paper presents, for the first time, the Correction Guide for the Approach-in-Process Test Version 2. In this paper, all the structural components of the correction guide are shown as well as its application to the specific content “we have no direct access to reality” taught in a particular university discipline. Applications of the Correction Guide in other teaching contents will be presented in future publications. They will show that the Approach-in-Process Test Version 2 can be applied and corrected in the diversity of school/academic contents.

Students’ approaches to learning are an important tool used by researchers in the field of educational psychology. The theory assumes that students have two basic ways of approaching objects of knowledge, a deep one and a superficial one. Both are reasonable predictors of academic performance. The study of the learning process requires instruments to be applied to students, nevertheless, the exclusive use of self-report instruments has substantially hindered an adequate study of this process. The Laboratory for Research on Cognitive Architecture (LAICO) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais brought forth an important recent contribution to learning approaches. This is the development of the Approach-in-Process Test (Version 2) which measures the students' process when using their learning approaches. The Approach-in-Process Test (Version 2) is completely original since it is a test based on performance that measures students’ learning approach in the academic learning context. In this paper, we make a presentation of the Approach-in-Process Test (Version 2) where we show in detail its structure and content.