ABSTRACT
Summary: The purpose of this paper is to show the predictive validity of a battery of pencil-and-paper psychometric aptitude tests administered to eighth or ninth graders in Israel. The criterion of validity was achievement on matriculation exams administered at the end of the twelfth grade.
The main issues of this paper are:
Success in the matriculation exams in Israel is a necessary requirement for admission to almost all higher education options. Only about 40 per cent of the Jewish elementary school graduates passed these exams in 1987. (Parallel figures for the non-Jewish population cannot be presented due to ambiguity in the definitions). This paper presents findings on the validity of the aptitude tests which serve as the basis for guidance and admission to high schools in Israel.
The criterion of matriculation, in spite of its importance, was found to suffer from low reliability. Nevo (1980) found that the correlations between two teachers independently assigning scores to matriculation exams vary between .42 (on composition) and .94 (on maths), with a median of about .75. Also, grades achieved in school showed only moderate correlations with the national matriculation scores (see ‘method’). The incongruence in the assessment of achievements limits the potential predictive validity of any suggested variable. The study will show the aptitude tests to be of significant predictive power despite the limitations of the criterion.
A prediction of any variable throughout the period of adolescence suffers from outside influence related to the biological and psychological characteristics of this stage of development. The relations which were found between prediction and criterion indicate the possibility of basing adolescents’ guidance on valid data.
Data indicate the relative predictive power of psychometric aptitude tests in comparison with other predictors (eg motivation, socio-economic conditions, health). This issue is interesting both for theoretical and practical implications.
