Historical Background
Although psychologists and educators were aware of several facets of validity before World War II, their methods for establishing validity were commonly restricted to correlations of test scores with some known criterion. Under the direction of Lee Cronbach, the 1954 Technical Recommendations for Psychological Tests and Diagnostic Techniques attempted to clarify and broaden the scope of validity by dividing it into four parts: (a) concurrent validity, (b) predictive validity, (c) content validity, and (d) construct validity. Cronbach and Meehl’s subsequent publication grouped predictive and concurrent validity into a "criterion-orientation", which eventually became criterion validity.
Over the next four decades, many theorists, including Cronbach himself, voiced their dissatisfaction with this three-in-one model of validity. Their arguments culminated in Samuel Messick’s 1995 article that described validity as a single construct composed of six "aspects". In his view, various inferences made from test scores may require different types of evidence, but not different validities.
The 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing largely codified Messick’s model. They describe five types of validity-supporting evidence that incorporate each of Messick’s aspects, and make no mention of the classical models’ content, criterion, and construct validities.
Read more about this topic: Test Validity
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