Does the Defining Issues Test measure psychological phenomena distinct from verbal ability? An examination of Lykken's query.

Abstract

This study examined the incremental validity of the Denning Issues Test (DIT), a test purporting to measure moral reasoning ability relative to verbal ability and other major markers of the construct of general intelligence (g). Across 2 independent studies of intellectually precocious adolescents (top 0.5%), results obtained with the DIT revealed that gifted individuals earned significantly higher moral reasoning scores than did their average-ability peers; they also scored higher than college freshmen, who were 4 to 5 years older. The relative standing of the intellectually gifted adolescents on moral reasoning, however, appears to be due to their superior level of verbal ability as opposed to any of a number of the other psychological variables examined here. The hypothesis that the DIT is conceptually distinct from conventional measures of verbal ability was not confirmed. Investigators conducting subsequent studies involving the assessment of moral reasoning are advised to incorporate measures of verbal ability into their designs, thereby enabling them to ascertain whether moral reasoning measures are indeed capturing systematic sources of individual differences distinct from verbal ability. This idea also is relevant to other concepts and measures purporting to assess optimal forms of human functioning more generally (e.g., creativity, ego development, and self-actualization).In the social sciences, measures do not always assess what they purport to measure, and the causal determinants of our most favorite constructs and outcomes do not always fit prior expectations. All too frequently in social science research, theoretically appealing constructs are assessed and studied without attending to competing variables that might be causally linked to their status as well as the criteria they predict. Socioeconomic status (SES), for example, is a variable that social scientists frequently assume to be causally related to a host of psychologically important phenomena (see the writings of Humphreys, 1991, and Meehl, 1970,1971a, 1971. In school and work settings, for example, SES is presumed to exert a profound causal role in determining the outcomes on conventional achievement criteria (cf. Humphreys, 1991). More powerful variables exist, however, for predicting academic and vocational criteria (e.g., human abilities;

Intelligence and maturity: Meta-analytic evidence for the incremental and discriminant validity of Loevinger's measure of ego development.

“…(p. 191) Similarly, Lykken (1991) wrote, "One can reasonably wonder whether many of the interesting findings obtained in research on Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development would remain if verbal intelligence had been partialed out in each case" (p. 35). Sanders, Lubinski, and Benbow (1995) tested the latter hypothesis and found that scores on the Defining Issues Test were unrelated to 62 criterion variables after partialing out the effects of verbal ability, a finding that prompted the following speculation:…”

Construct and incremental validity of dynamic assessment of decoding within and across domains

“…It has been noted that some innovative constructs that make intuitive sense have frequently failed to add value when compared with preexisting measures (e.g., Sanders, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1995 (Jitendra & Kameenui, 1993). If DA does not add a significant amount of information to the existing measures in explaining students' academic performance, the benefits of DA may not outweigh its costs.…”

A multidisciplinary review into the definition, operationalization, and measurement of talent

“…Informed by the theories about multiple intelligences we previously discussed (Bailey & Morley, 2006;Major, Johnson & Deary, 2012), we identify a wide range of multifaceted and domain-specific ability tests designed to capture specific innate abilities, that can be applied in talent-identification procedures (see Table 1) such as WISC-R, the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test, and the Self-Regulation and Concentration Test (Bianco, 2010;Sanders, Lubinski & Benbow, 1995;Saccuzzo & Johnson, 1995: Periathiruvadi & Rinn, 2012Preckel & Tiemann, 2003). These tests are frequently combined with subjective judgments collected through supervisor, peer, and self-evaluation (Bailey & Morley, 2006;Baldwin, 2005).…”