Knowledge Competency Examination Outline

4. History and Systems of Psychology

General Overview of the Competency Exams

Regardless of your specialty area, the faculty at Alliant believe that everyone earning a doctorate in
psychology should know something about the core areas of the basic discipline of psychology. Each
doctoral program in psychology at CSPP-SD and MGSM is required to demonstrate in some way that its
students have mastered core knowledge in these basic areas. In addition, APA accreditation of clinical
psychology programs requires that programs demonstrate that they have imparted this knowledge in some
way. The COMPS provide one way to document that students have mastered key elements of this
knowledge.

Different programs ask students to demonstrate core knowledge in different ways. Some programs require
that students take and pass a course, some that they take and pass a COMP, some that they do both. In
addition, taking and passing a mastery exam (like a COMP) with specific content to be mastered requires
that students learn material they may not have mastered in courses and to review material in new ways.
Faculty members believe this process helps students to consolidate and expand their knowledge.

Finally, the COMPS resemble the kind of national examination students must pass to be licensed as
psychologists in most states. Faculty members believe that passing the COMPS is a relevant professional
experience that helps students prepare for the licensing examination. Students who have traditionally done
poorly on this type of objective test, for example, have the opportunity to practice taking mastery content-
based examinations and to improve their test-taking, study, and content-mastery skills.

Are these exams reliable and valid?

The Knowledge Competency Exams are appropriately categorized as mastery (criterion-referenced) tests,
not norm-referenced tests. The psychometric requirements of mastery tests differ from the requirements
of norm-based tests designed to illuminate individual differences. Content validity of mastery tests, not
their internal consistency or predictive ability, is the relevant standard for the development and validation
of such tests. We build content validity into the tests in several ways. First, we develop outlines that
clearly specify the general content areas required by students to be mastered. Second, we make sure each
item in our item pools fits with an area on the content outline. Third, each exam is created by selecting
items from an extensive item pool created for the content area. Questions on each exam sample broadly
from the range of content covered by the outline. A faculty member knowledgeable in the content area
assessed by the exam creates each exam. Fourth, we try to ensure that more than one professor who has
substantive knowledge in a content area reviews the questions to rephrase terminology that may be
"professor specific." Finally, we periodically conduct formal reviews and updates of item content for each
of the examinations.

Although customary indicators of reliability, item difficulty statistics, and item discrimination statistics
are not as relevant to mastery tests as they are to norm-based tests, we do use these indicators after each
exam is given determine whether any items should be eliminated from individual exams. All students are
given credit for any poorly-performing items that have been deleted from a specific test.

In addition, the examination committee has in the past conducted several analyses relevant to the validity

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of COMPS. These analyses indicated that COMPS scores correlated positively with student’s reports of
number of hours spent studying and correlated negatively with number of less-than-full-credit grades
(NC, MP, C or lower) received in the program. Furthermore, there were no gender or ethnic differences in
rates of passing exams.

Remember: Each time an exam is given, 50 questions are drawn from the large pool of items for that test,
sampling broadly from the content on the outline. The sampling is not random, but seeks to represent the
broad (i.e., the Roman numeral) categories on the outline. On any given exam, there may be some more
specific areas that do not have many questions, and others that have more. The purpose of the exams is to
ensure that students have learned the broad range of material covered in the outline; mastery of the
material is assessed by a sampling of questions, rather than by covering every single area on each exam.

You must achieve a score of 74% to pass each exam. After the exam, you will receive a feedback sheet
that identifies the portion of the outline to which each question was keyed, and indicates which items you
missed. You will not receive and will not be able to review your actual exam or the specific questions on
it.

Information specific to this exam: For the outline of material in History and Systems of Psychology,
there are 12 large categories of material covered (the Roman numeral categories). The general
distribution of questions for each administration of this exam will be approximately as follows:

I. Psychoanalytic: 30-35%

II. Existential: 20-25%

III. Behavioral/Social Learning: 30-35%

IV. Trait and Type: 10-20%

This distribution is based partly on the judgment of the faculty about the relative importance and
relevance of the material in the various categories, and partly upon the number of available questions in
the pool.

Content Outline for History and Systems of Psychology

I. The pre-enlightenment thinkers

A. The Greeks

1. Nativism: Socrates and Plato

2. Observation and induction: Aristotle

3. Atomism: Democritus

4. Anatomy: Galen

B. Renaissance thinking

1. Mind and body: Descartes

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 2. The beginnings of science: Galileo, Newton, and Harvey

II. Enlightenment philosophers

A. Empiricism:

1. Locke

2. Berkeley

B. Associationism:

1. Hume

2. J.S. Mill

3. Hartley

C. Nativism: Kant

III. Physiological beginnings

A. Spinal reflexes: Whytt

B. Specific nerve energies: Muller

C. Spinal Cord roots: Bell and Magendie

D. Electrical nerve conduction: Galvani and Helmholtz

E. Brain localization: Gall, Flourens, Broca

IV. The beginnings of experimental psychology

A. Psychological experimentation, introspectionism, the first laboratory: Wundt and Titchener

B. Laws of sensation, the beginnings of psychophysics: Fechner, Weber

C. Imageless thought and the beginnings of Gestalt psychology: Kulpe

D. Memory, forgetting, nonsense syllables: Ebbinghaus

V. British and American beginnings: The influence of Darwin

A. Heredity and measurement, statistics, correlation

1. Galton

2. Cattell

B. Functionalism:

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 1. James

2. Hall

3. Dewey

4. Angell

5. Thorndike

VI. Gestalt Psychology – in Germany and America

A. Kohler

B. Koffka

C. Wertheimer

VII. Early Behaviorism

A. Conditioning theory

1. Sechenov

2. Pavlov

3. Watson

B. Learning theory

1. Thorndike

2. Skinner

3. Hull (and Spence, Miller, and Mowrer)

4. Tolman

5. Guthrie

6. Bandura

VIII. Psychoanalysis

A. Classic: Freud and Jung

B. Social: Adler

C. Neo-Freudians :Fromm, Horney, Sullivan

D. Ego psychologists/Developmental: Anna Freud, Bowlby, Erickson, Hartmann

E. Object Relations; Kernberg, Winnicott, Mahler, Fairbairn, Kohut

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IX. Humanism

A. Humanism: Rogers, Maslow

B. Existentialism: May

C. Gestalt: Perls

D. Phenomenology; Georgi

X. History of Clinical Psychology

A. Medical Antecedents: Tuke, Pinel, Charcot, Janet, Dix, Kraepelin

B. Clinical psychology in America: Witmer and psychological clinics, Testing in WWI and
WWII, APA Division, Boulder and Vail training models

C. Development of Professional Psychology: APA, Psychological clinics, licensing, training

D. Psychological testing movement: Binet, Goddard, Terman, Yerkes, Rorschach, Murray, Holt
E. Psychotherapies: Psychoanalytic therapies, Humanistic and Existential therapies, Family
systems therapies, Behavioral therapies, Cognitive and Cognitive-Behavioral therapies,
Integrative therapies

F. Child psychology: Piaget, Stern, Vygotsky, Watson & Raynor, Child Guidance Movement,
Kanner, Burlingham & Freud, Melanie Klein

XI. Twentieth century developments

A. Social psychology (Mead, Allport, Lewin, Festinger)

B. Cognitive psychology (Bartlett, Bruner, Simon, Miller, Chomsky, Piaget)

C. Family Systems (Whitaker, Satir, Minuchin, Bowen, Haley)

D. Neuroscience ( Hubel & Wiesel, Hebb, Lashley, Penfield, Sperry)

E. Ethology (Tinbergen, Lorenz, von Frisch)

XII. Minority groups in the history of psychology

A. Women: Mary Calkins, Margaret Washburn. Beverly Prosser

B. African-Americans: Francis Sumner, Charles Thompson, Kenneth Clark

C. History of Hispanic-American Psychology

D. History of Asian-American Psychology

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 Recommended Reading List

Original materials

Classics in the History of Psychology. On-line collection of dozens of historically influential

psychological texts, and links to 100+ others, edited by Christopher D. Green, York University. The
web link is http://psychclassics.yorku.ca

Benjamin, Ludy T., Jr. (1992). A history of psychology in letters. New York: McGraw-Hill.

General textbooks:

Hothersall, David (1995). History of psychology (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Watson, Robert I. & Evans, Rand B. (1991). The great psychologists: A history of psychological thought.
(5th. ed.). Harper Collins

Brennan, J.F. (2002). History and systems of psychology (6th ed.). Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Finger, S. (2000). Minds behind the brain: a history of the pioneers and their discoveries. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Gardner, H. (1987 ). The mind's new science: a history of the cognitive revolution: with a new epilogue,
cognitive science after 1984. New York: Basic Books

Reisman, J.M. (1991). A history of clinical psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Hemisphere.