BRIEF NOTE ON GRADUATE TRAINING IN STATISTICS, METHODOLOGY, AND MEASUREMENT IN PSYCHOLOGY '

Summary.-Support is presented for the criticisms of Aiken, et al. in the American Psychologist of weakened current doctoral training for psychologists in quantitative, psychometric, and statistical methods and in assessment. Aiken, West, Sechrest, and Reno (1990) with commentary by four current or recent editors of APA journals reported the results of a survey of Ph.D. programs in North America in assessing which advances in statistics, measurement, and methodology have been incorporated into doctoral training in psychology within the past 30 yr. The findings are at best disap ointing to psychometricians and quantitative psychologists; typically, they are downright lightening. Psychology as a disci he which was once referred to as the "science of sophomores" and which was not even formAy recognized as a science until 1982 when the International Union of Ps cholo ical Science was finally admitted to the International Council of Scientific Unions as a fd metnter, now is on the threshold of retrogression as a respected academic/research discipline if one is to heed the warnings of the coauthors of the above report. The fact that very little advance has been made in the statistical and methodological curriculum and that a decline has even been suffered in the measurement courses for doctoral students in psychology comes as no surprise to me. I have been followin this trend closely durin this time as a teacher of courses in all of these areas, as a member of editorial boards and reafer of professional journals in psychology, as a reader of doctoral dissertations both within my own department and outside as a member of APA site visit teams, and as expert witness in court cases involving relevant issues. It has been my continuing distressful experience to realize that what Aiken and her collaborators are saying is, unfortunately, dramatically true. Doctoral-level psychologists in their predoctoral training are being exrd, in the main, to pre-1960 traditional univariate statistical methods, merely to convention research methodologies and to diminishing focus on psychometrics and measurement theory, and to rely too heavily on computerized statistical packages with their sometimes dangerous built-in defaults. As a consequence, all too often researchers, teachers, and practitioners in their work and in their instruction of others tend to ignore sound principles of psychometrics, test theory, multivariate statistics, factor analysis, causal modeling, and multidimensional scaling. They even show their ignorance of basic hypothesis testing when authors re ort the impossible probabdity of p = ,000, and reviewers condone the widespread practice o!performing psychological assessments on individuals by treating test scores as points rather than ranges as required when standard errors of measurement or of estimate are necessarily taken into account (see Matarazzo, 1990). I reinforce Aiken, et af.'s plea and add a call for modification and upgrading of all doctoral training in sychology in these necessary quantitative areas. The alternative a pears to be the degrading oPpsychologlcal research and practice, articularly of assessment, to tie lower level at which it was once judgcd to be by scientists in otger respected disciplines.