Like all chapters in this book, we wish to document another one of Dr. Alan S. Kaufman's contributions, one that we think is of greatest impact on the disciplines of psychology, school psychology, educational psychology, and related fields. We think that his most innovative work, and the contribution likely to have the most long-term impact, was his joining of the two disciplines of measurement science and clinical assessment practice. He did so by essentially creating a new methodology of intelligence test interpretation, a method that has spread to clinical assessment practice in general, and it may be characterized in today's terminology as an early form of “evidence-based” test interpretive practice, one that emphasizes a psychometric approach to evaluating individual performance on a battery of tests as expressed as test scores.

Professor Kaufman's innovative insight is typical of breakthroughs that are made in the space between traditional boundaries, in this case, between two disciplines that were not closely aligned prior to the publication of his seminal 1979 work, Intelligent Testing with the WISC-R. His work takes its place alongside other breakthroughs such as the merger of mathematical modeling and chemistry to form the field of quantitative chemistry, combining the fields of physics and mathematics to create magnetic resonance imaging equipment, and merging information technology and health care to create the field of health informatics.