Testing and assessment in psychology. A survey on Italian psychologists at the time of COVID-19 pandemic

Italian Universities offer undergraduate and graduate training on tests for students and are also the main providers of Continuous Education credit on test assessment for Italian Psychologists (Alessandri et al., 2021). With both students and professionals, teaching tests requires either to follow the most advanced scientific standards in the choice of which instruments to promote or wide spreading guideline for test use. A further complication in the field of teaching tests is finding a balance between two opposite positions: (1) giving theoretically driven knowledge and leaving that the specific tools will be learned by the psychologists at the beginning of their professional practice; (2) delivering a good knowledge and proficiency of most of the tools used at a given time in a specific community. With the aim to offer a contribution to these issues, here we present the responses to a survey that involved the psychologists registered to the Italian Board of Psychologists. The survey aimed at providing: (a) the actual picture of psychological testing and assessment in the professional practice; (b) the attitudes toward the use of testing and the evaluation of the quality of the available instruments; (c) the quantity and quality of training received as regards psychological assessment at University, with a particular focus on Norm Referenced Tests (NRT). We believe that the data presented here will be useful to improve teaching in psychology as well as professional training. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition to tools to be administered remotely and the survey also covered this aspect.