ABSTRACT
When originally conceived, this chapter was to be a recapitulation of the Second Life Span Developmental Psychology Conference. This was to be the chapter that summarized and put into perspective the sparkling new papers presented on the conference topic, “Assessment and Intervention: Issues Across the Life Span.” However, due to unavoidable circumstances, the summary was actually presented as the first paper of the conference and the reordering in presentation serendipitously became an advantage. In the lead chapter, it is possible to present a retrospective of the status of assessment across the life span, followed by a discussion of how assessment could and should interface with intervention. The retrospective was shaped, in part, by the nine papers that were presented at the First Life-Span Developmental Psychology Conference, titled “Assessment of Biological Mechanisms Across the Life Span.” The papers presented at the conference described a variety of different assessments useful for infants, children, and adults that were developed over many decades of work. Yet, as was clear from those papers, much remains to be learned about how the results obtained from the application of assessment techniques can be linked to appropriate intervention strategies. As the papers presented in the second conference revealed, many intervention strategies with demonstrated effectiveness for remediating a variety of developmental, social, and cognitive disabilities and different medical and physiological problems are not directly and individually linked to specific assessments. How to link the most effective assessments with the most effective interventions still remains to be determined.
