The International Cognitive Ability Resource

经过一个多世纪对认知能力的积极研究，现在已经出现了几十种种类繁多的评估工具。其中许多由于过时或维护不善而不再广泛使用。其余的大多数--那些经常使用和维护良好的测试--通常可以分为两大类：(1)由盈利的商业实体拥有和管理的专有措施，或(2)通常由孤立的研究小组为狭隘目的开发和使用的特殊措施。这种情况对国际认知能力研究人员来说是有问题的，因为它阻碍了跨子领域的研究结果的推广，更广泛地说，减缓了知识进步的步伐。这种情况在社会层面上的具体后果通过认知能力评估在临床环境(用于诊断认知障碍)和选择环境(用于人员招聘或学术招生)中的有限效用表现出来。这些后果将通过开发国际认知能力资源(ICAR)来解决，这是一个公共领域和开放源码的工具，将结合现代项目生成和适应性测试技术。从本质上讲，ICAR是一个国际合作框架。这一框架将促进开发一个大型和动态的认知能力测量库，用于广泛的各种应用。通过鼓励世界各地合格的研究小组使用、修订和不断发展这些测量，ICAR将进一步了解认知能力的结构以及认知能力结构和他们预测的生活结果之间关联的性质。这一框架并非没有先例；一个类似的项目已经在心理学中应用。国际人格项目库(IPIP)是一大批公开提供的人格项目，是为了解决测量标准的类似问题而引入的。该项目取得了相当大的成功；在过去十年中，通过国际知识产权计划措施收集的数据为500多篇期刊文章和书籍章节做出了贡献。建议的ICAR并不完全类似，主要是因为认知能力项目与典型的自我报告人格项目有根本的不同。虽然后者是典型行为的衡量标准，但大多数智力项目的目的是评估最佳表现。这种区别使得ICAR的开发具有相当大的挑战性，尽管已经证明这种开发是可行的。这里提出的开发项目将产生一个包含许多类型的“项目生成器”的资源。这些功能将作为心理测量信息、易于实现的开放源码软件的功能分发。研究小组将能够通过广泛使用的开放源码统计软件平台R下载该软件，从而使用这些项目生成器。根据需要，将鼓励合格的国际研究人员修订现有的项目生成器并开发更多类型。这些项目生成器将非常适合于可能在互联网上进行的大规模国际数据收集。

After more than a century of active research on cognitive abilities, there now exist dozens of assessment tools of tremendous variety. Many of these are no longer widely used on account of being outdated or poorly maintained. Most of the remainder - those tests which are actively used and well maintained - can generally be organized into two broad types: (i) proprietary measures owned and administered by profitable commercial entities or (ii) idiosyncratic measures which are usually developed and used by isolated research groups for narrow purposes. This circumstance is problematic for the international community of cognitive ability researchers because it inhibits the generalization of findings across sub-fields and, more generally, slows the pace at which knowledge can advance. The tangible consequences of this circumstance on the societal level are manifested through limited utility of cognitive ability assessment in clinical settings (as used for diagnoses of cognitive impairment) and selection contexts (as used for personnel recruitment or academic admissions).These consequences will be addressed by the development of the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR), a public-domain and open-source tool which will incorporate modern item generation and adaptive testing techniques. At its essence, ICAR is a framework for international collaboration. This framework will facilitate the development of a large and dynamic bank of cognitive ability measures for use in a wide variety of applications. By encouraging the use, revision, and ongoing development of these measures among qualified research groups around the world, the ICAR will further understanding about the structure of cognitive abilities as well as the nature of associations between cognitive ability constructs and the life outcomes they predict.This framework is not without precedent; a similar project has been implemented for use in psychology. The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) is a large collection of publicly available personality items which was introduced to resolve similar problems with measurement standards. This project has met with considerable success; data collected with IPIP measures have contributed to more than 500 journal articles and book chapters over the last decade. The proposed ICAR is not entirely analogous, mainly because cognitive ability items are fundamentally different from typical, self-report personality items. While the latter are measures of typical behaviour, most intelligence items are intended to assess maximal performance. This distinction makes the development of ICAR considerably more challenging, though it has already been demonstrated that such development is feasible.The development project proposed herein will result in a resource which contains many types of "item generators". These will be distributed as functions in psychometrically informed, easily implemented, open-source software. Researchgroups will be able to use these item generators by downloading the software through the widely-used, open-source statistical software platform, R. As needed, the revision of existing item generators and the development of additional types will be encouraged among qualified international researchers. These item generators will be well suited for large scale, international data collection as might be conducted over the internet.