Question

An educational psychologist wants to make sure his measure of verbal learning is valid. He theorizes that his measure should not be strongly related to numerical learning (a different construct) and plans to test this using a correlation coefficient. Which of the following validitities is he concerned with?

Select one:
a. Predictive validity
b. Known groups validity
c. Discriminant validity
d. Convergent validity

Answer 1

The educational psychologist is concerned with discriminant validity, which assesses whether a measure of one construct is not strongly related to different constructs, in this case, verbal learning and numerical learning.

Step-by-step explanation:

The educational psychologist concerned with the relationship between his measure of verbal learning and numerical learning is focusing on discriminant validity. Discriminant validity is a type of construct validity that is concerned with the measure's ability to distinguish between different constructs. If the measure of verbal learning does not correlate strongly with numerical learning, it would support the notion that the two are distinct constructs, thereby demonstrating discriminant validity. This differentiates from other forms of validity, such as convergent validity (which assesses the extent to which measures that are supposed to be related are, indeed, related) and predictive validity (which measures how well a test predicts outcomes).