Doctors and lawyers have been part of modern Western societies for hundreds of years. But educational psychologists are a much more recent phenomenon in the professions, tracing as they do their heritage only from 1913, when Sir Cyril Burt was appointed by the London County Council as the first educational psychologist in the world! One can only describe the history of such a profession as revolutionary — not evolutionary — since over that 70 years, educational psychologists have come to be employed by every local education authority in Britain and likewise in large numbers in Australia.

In the Education Department of Victoria educational psychologists are employed under the title of Guidance Officers, a rather interesting title. The Counselling Guidance and Clinical Services Branch of the Victorian Education Department is the largest employer of psychologists in Australia: a close estimate suggests some 326 work in this service. The total staff is over 600 and includes social workers, welfare officers, interpreters, speech therapists and a large secretarial, clerical and typist force. In the U.K. with a population of over 56 million and an estimated school age population of 8 million, only 1,300 educational psychologists are employed by the local education authorities.

The comparison between Britain and Victoria in the numbers of educational psychologists employed relative to the number of school children in the two countries is instructive. Victoria has less than 450,000 school age children; it employs over 300 CG & CS officers. This gives a ratio of educational psychologists to schoolchildren of approximately 1:1380 compared to 1:6154 in the U.K. Thus schoolchildren in Victoria would appear to require almost five times as many educational psychologists as the schoolchildren in Britain. Or is it as simple as that? Is the high ratio of educational psychologists in Victoria a reflection of the real needs of Victorian schoolchildren or is it a reflection of the interests (and I use that term in a political self-interest sense) of educational psychologists?

Whilst the Victorian Education Department does not provide school based psychologists, many non government schools in Victoria have done so for a number of years. The girls'school at which I work has employed “counsellors” for nearly 40 years. The counsellor has been a psychologist for about 20 years and for the last 6 years the school has employed two full time psychologists. The school currently has 1004 students in the Senior School (years 7 to 12) and 370 students in the Junior School (preparatory to Grade 6). I believe all schools, both government and non government should employ school based psychologists because they can contribute in ways that are not possible for a person who is based elsewhere and visits a school once, or even several times a week.

This article is directed at both academic and practitioner psychologists. My reflections on the mythology that surrounds the application of intelligence tests and their educational equivalents in schools are directed at the former group, of which I am one. These beliefs persist partly because current developments in psychological theory generally have had very little impact on the practice of cognitive testing and even less impact on educational testing (Davidson, 1982a). When doubts are raised about testing of minority group children practitioners are often told simply that current testing procedures are inappropriate but are not told about alternative assessment procedures and the advantages and difficulties they impose.

A second aim therefore is to explore some of the alternatives. For that reason the title refers to “cognitive” assessment rather than to intellectual or educational assessment, the aim being to consider the contributions of cognitive science generally and cross-cultural cognitive psychology particularly to the development of alternative assessment procedures. It also refers deliberately to “educational” minorities rather than cultural minorities, because some of these principles apply equally to social minorities whose home circumstances and educational needs are different from those of the majority, and to groups that form cultural majorities but whose access to education is restricted by a politically dominant cultural minority.

To provide a framework for our discussion of the use of non-verbal ability tests, I would like to precede my paper by a few general remarks concerning ability testing in the 1980s. Everything I am going to say does, in fact, apply to non-verbal tests, the same as it applies to other types of tests; and it certainly applies to the battery of non-verbal ability tests, the NAT, which the ACER will publish during the next 12 months.

We cannot ignore the controversy which is going on around us. No one operates in a vacuum. No matter what our present personal attitude to the use of tests in assessment might be, nothing we do can be perceived in isolation from present, and for that matter past, debate in the field.

We are finding ourselves at a point in time where there is widespread concern and often fierce debate about the use of standardized tests for the assessment of individual differences and the evaluation of programs.

Direct Instruction (D.I.) is a fairly recent model of teaching, but some of its underlying principles and strategies go back to the early 1970's (see the review by Rosenshine 1978).

The D.I. model of teaching is “an orientation that identifies major skills, selects and modifies commercial programmes that teach those skills, appropriately places students in the classroom programmes, and presents lessons each day in the most efficient manner possible” (Carnine & Silbert, 1979 p.11). D.I. focuses on such factors as increasing engaged time (the amount of time students actually spent on tasks relevant to the skill they are practising), improving the organization of the classroom to allow for more engaged time and carefully structuring the teaching programme to include an objective-based mastery learning paradigm, with frequent criterion-referenced testing to check that objectives have been met.

Central to the teaching programme is the task analysis of complex cognitive tasks such as reading, into hierarchies of component skills, which are then taught. Once students have been taught these component skills, they are taught how to combine them, to develop skills in the original, more complex task. (Carnine & Silbert, 1979 p. 11).