In the category of Assessment and Testing on the National Counselor Examination (NCE), the Counselor Preparation Comprehensive Examination (CPCE), or another counseling exam, you’ll most likely encounter the terms validity and reliability.
In the world of assessment and testing, validity and reliability are ultra important to understand. They are key concepts related to this topic, so having a solid idea of what they are will be critical in your test preparation process.
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Assessment and testing can be a challenging and confusing section of the NCD, the CPC, or other counseling exams, with all of the terms and concepts that are required to know for the assessment piece of these exams. It can be a lot to wrap your mind around. Today we’re going to be covering validity and reliability, which are two very important things to know as you go into your exams. And having a good understanding of them will be very important for the assessment and testing section.
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My name is Keegan. I recently graduated with a master’s degree in counseling. I’m making this video and the other videos on my channel to help you prepare for the NC, the CPC, or whatever counseling exam you’re needing to take. As we begin this video, let’s start with a quick overview of each of the terms. Validity is the ability for an assessment to measure what it’s actually intending to measure. Where reliability is, whether that assessment can measure that same concept or whatever it is trying to measure. If it can do that time and time again and do it accurately each time.
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So with that very brief explanation of each behind us, let’s begin with validity and talking about what that is in more depth. As I said, validity is the ability for an assessment to measure what it is actually trying to measure. As an example, if you’re trying to measure someone’s IQ, but you end up testing their eyesight, that test has very low to no validity at all that would be because IQ and eyesight are very different things. However, an assessment could get closer to measuring what it’s trying to and still not be valid. An example here would be if you’re trying to measure IQ and you end up measuring somebody’s vocabulary alone.
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These are very close. Vocabulary is most likely going to be part of an IQ assessment. However, if you’re only measuring their vocabulary and calling it their IQ, then the assessment or the test is not valid. So what would be valid? Well, if you have an IQ assessment and actually measure somebody’s IQ quite well, that would be a valid assessment. Experts consider validity to be the most important part of an assessment. And this makes sense if you want something to measure a certain topic or concept,
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it’s important that it actually measures that. If we continue our example, if you have an IQ assessment and it actually measures IQ, it’s valid in measuring IQ. That’s really important because without that validity, the assessment is really not worth anything. Before we move on to reliability, if you’re enjoying this video and you’re finding it helpful, please help me up by giving this video a like and subscribing to the channel. Now let’s talk about reliability. If an assessment is given to the same person multiple times
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and each time their result is very different, that assessment would probably not be considered reliable at that point because you can’t consistently get a similar result each time. However, if the same person is given the same assessment multiple times based out by a couple of weeks or so for each administration and each time their score is roughly the same, that assessment then would probably be pretty reliable. If we think about this in terms of a postage scale, if you put a box on the scale and measure it and get one pound and then measure that same box with no changes a second time and get three pounds
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and then measure it a third time and get two pounds, that postage scale is not reliable at all. You’re getting different results every time. The same thing would be with assessment then if you’re getting different results for roughly the same thing or the same person taking the assessment, then it’s probably not reliable. One thing to keep in mind though, is with a postage scale and a box that you’re trying to weigh, that’s pretty easy. You are expecting the same result every time.
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As long as you haven’t changed the box or put something in or taken something out. When you’re measuring something more psychological or that involves our mind, things get a little bit trickier. So keep in mind that something being reliable doesn’t mean that you have to get the exact same result every time, but it needs to be close to be more reliable. So the closer it gets or the closer each administration gets, the more reliable it is. So if you’re measuring someone’s IQ and you get a score of 105, measure it again, you get 108,
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measure it again, you get 104. Then that assessment is probably pretty reliable at measuring their IQ. That is, of course, assuming that the assessment has already been shown to be valid. However, 105 the first time, 125 the second time and then 78 the third time, it’s probably not a reliable test of IQ or a reliable test because the results are so different on each administration. Something that is super important to know is that a reliable test is not always valid,
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but a valid test is always reliable. I’ll say that again. A reliable test is not always valid, but a valid test is always reliable. I hope that this video helps you understand the concepts of validity and reliability more. I’m going to be coming out with a video in more depth on each of these that goes into more detail and different types of validity and reliability. So keep an eye out for that. Again, I hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks so much for watching.
