Ideas worth thinking about. Evidence worth examining.
Read perspectives from The PsychoMath on careers, psychology, assessment, education, behavioural science, research and emerging trends.
Everything we publish appears here, newest first, whatever subject it belongs to. If you already know what you are looking for, the six subject indexes will narrow it faster. If you do not, this is the better place to browse — a good deal of what we write turns out to be useful to somebody who arrived looking for something else entirely.
22 articles
Newest first
Reading a psychological report: a guide for parents
What the sections mean, which sentences to trust, and the four questions worth asking before you act on any of it.
What we will not claim
A short list of the things assessment cannot do, stated in advance rather than discovered later.
Assessment is not a verdict
Where we stand on what a psychological instrument is for, and what it is not for.
Regression to the mean, and why the second test looks worse
One of the most useful ideas in measurement, and the one whose absence produces the most confident wrong conclusions.
Sample, population, and why the norms matter more than the score
A test result is a comparison. If you do not know the comparison group, you do not have a result.
Correlation, causation and the career report
The gap between “these two things go together” and “this one produced that one” is where most over-claiming happens.
Before you buy an AI-based assessment, ask these questions
The technology is new. The questions that decide whether an instrument is sound are not.
Learning analytics and the pull towards what is easy to measure
Every dashboard reports the quantities the system happens to collect, and those are rarely the quantities that matter.
What AI can and cannot do in a career conversation
It is genuinely good at some parts of this work and structurally unsuited to others. The division is worth being clear about.
The corridor conversation: what teachers are actually asked
Most career guidance in a school happens in two minutes, standing up, from someone who has had no training for it.
What marks measure, and what they miss
Marks are the most available information about a student and the most over-interpreted.
Learning styles: a comfortable idea that measurement does not support
The claim is not that people are all alike. It is that sorting them into visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners does not improve how they are…
Who is allowed to interpret a psychological test, and why the rule exists
Restricted access to instruments looks like gatekeeping. It is closer to a safety rule, and the reasons are worth stating.
Every score has a margin around it
A number reported to the decimal place invites a precision that no psychological measurement possesses.
Reliability and validity, without the jargon
A test can be highly reliable and completely useless. The two words are not synonyms and the difference decides whether a report means anything.
What a percentile actually tells you
It is one of the most reported numbers in assessment and one of the most misread.
The advice trap: why everyone gives the same three answers
The people who care most about a student are often the least able to widen their options, and there is a structural reason for it.
People are poor at predicting what will suit them at work
Not because they lack self-knowledge, but because they are imagining the wrong thing.
Interest, aptitude and motivation are three different things
They are routinely spoken of as one, and the confusion produces some of the worst career advice given to students.
The jobs that do not exist yet, and what to do about that
Targeting an occupation that may be reshaped in a decade is a weak strategy. Building a capability is a stronger one.
Stream selection is not career selection
Class 10 decides a great deal less than families think, and a great deal more than students are told.
“What do you want to become?” is the wrong first question
It asks a child to name an answer before anyone has helped them gather the information the answer depends on.
