Essentials of WAIS-III Assessment (Essentials of Psychological Assessment Series) Description:

Essentials of WAIS-III Assessment (Essentials of Psychological Assessment Series) review:
2 stars (Disappointing, again and again...) - I am a clinical psychology graduate student, and every time I turn to this book for help related to interpretation--what a part of the test means or can tell us about a person--I am sorely disappointed. It is terribly psychometric and formal, giving facts about the test but few clues for what to do with it; even something as simple as a useful description of one of the index scores is lacking. There are reference tables included, but I have found even those more difficult to locate when I need them than seems necessary. Frustrating...
5 stars (Clear and user-friendly yet sophisticated) - This is a gem of a book. I assigned it for the grad students in my intellectual assessment course and both they and I found it to be very helpful and easy to use. The format of the book makes it very user-friendly and unintimidating. There are a lot of boxes and highlighted text that help the reader to find what he or she is looking for quickly. This book covers administration, scoring, and interpretation and provides numerous helpful tips for beginners on common errors. The approach to interpretation provided in this book is a pared-down and slightly modified version of the method described in Kaufman's book Intelligent Testing with the WISC-III (an excellent book with a great deal of information on interpreting the WISC-III). Kaufman and Lichtenberger take the guess work and estimation out of interpreting the significance of various scores. This approach is based in the scientific method (assume nonsignificance unless you have a compelling reason, based on the test data, to believe that the variations in scores on the test protocol are unlikely to have resulted by chance). This approach is very helpful in giving students an understanding of how much variation in test scores can result from test error, and brings the "science" back into test interpretation. There are a lot of numbers to crunch using this method, and in some ways the clarity of the system can encourage users to become mechanistic, but I feel that the emphasis on systematic and defensible interpretation is well worth this risk. Kaufman's approach has become the basis of the standard described in the WAIS manual and calculated on the WAIS-III record form, and this book is an excellent way to learn it and the rationale behind it. The book is also an excellent reference for practitioners. I find myself pulling it off my shelf very frequently as I supervise student assessments, and it's loaned out to various students a lot of the time. The book provides pages of useful tables, some of which are in the WAIS-III manual, but many of which are not. One caution is that the shared abilities tables provided here are based on theory rather than data, so it's important to take these with a grain of salt. Also there are a couple of points in the "decision tree" where it's not entirely clear in some situations what the reader is to do. This is not a common problem, but one that is not really adequately addressed in my opinion.Overall a truly excellent book that raises the standard for WAIS-III interpretation above that seen in many practitioners. This is a treasure chest of information at a great price.
5 stars (A must have!) - I am a graduate student in psychology and this is the clearest text I have ever read that describes the interpretive process of IQ tests! Look for their new book for WISC interpretation as well!