Embedded within the globalization movement, the internationalization of testing and assessment has encouraged scholars, professionals and practitioners to work together to enhance our research and practice in the cross-cultural context. The International Test Commission (ITC) was formed to serve this need. The ITC seeks to facilitate the exchange of information among members and stimulate cooperation on problems related to the construction, distribution, and use of psychological tests and other psycho-diagnostic tools. The ITC has also sought to advance our knowledge and best practices related to international testing by the publication of guidelines and of a journal, the International Journal of Testing. Consistent with these aims, the executive council of the ITC decided to launch a Handbook to present a state-of-the-art review on international testing. The ITC International Handbook of Testing and Assessment has been published to address the many challenges facing the cross-cultural applications of psychological and educational testing in this era of globalization. It also represents and showcases the concerted efforts of the ITC in tackling the wide range of problems and complexities in international psychological testing. The ITC Handbook has also been designed to provide information and resources to help guide professionals and graduate students regarding testing and assessment from an international and global perspective. The current Symposium will provide a sampling of the content from the Handbook by having each of the co-editors present a summary of their chapters.

Paper 1: Assessment of Career Interests, Frederick T.L. Leong, Weiqiao Fan, and Xiaolu Zhou
The work of career interest assessment bridges various career interest theories and their applications in practice. However, the interface between theory and application in career interests has often been challenged in terms of cross-cultural validity and the role in explaining and predicting behaviors for specific groups such as different genders in a cultural setting. E. K. Strong's introduction of the Strong Vocational Interest Bank in the 1920s reflects the earlier work in the field of career interests, whereas interest literature since the 1970s has primarily employed Holland's RIASEC model to organize empirical evidence. Based on the corresponding measures of career interests, the construct validity of the important theoretical models for career interests is first reviewed. The predictive validities of career interest are then examined in terms of career development, human resources and organizational behaviors, and academic achievement. With regard to the cultural specificity of career interests, in comparison with European Americans, the results for Blacks from the U. S. and South Africa, and for Chinese populations are reviewed in this paper. In view of the significant contributions of gender to vocational interests, some interesting interactions between cultures and gender on career interests are reviewed in the aspects of the factor structure of interests. Developmental gender differences and gender differences in specific dimensions such as realistic and social interests are reviewed as well. Finally, future research directions of career interest assessment are discussed in terms of cultural validity and cultural specificity.

Paper 2: Personality Assessment, Dragos Iliescu and Dan Ispas
The paper focuses on the assessment of personality in an international context. Starting from the definition of personality, the paper discusses the way culture and personality are mixed and then set out to explain the emic (indigenous) vs. etic (universal) debate in personality assessment. The combined emic-etic approach is outlined as an interesting evolution in cross-cultural personality assessment and two measures based on this approach are discussed, the Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Inventory and the South-African Personality Inventory. Finally, the paper discusses the currently dominant model of personality used in assessment internationally, the Five-Factor model, outlining some of the dilemmas still being debated related to this model, such as the broad vs. narrow debate, the cross-cultural replicability issue, or the bandwidth-fidelity dilemma.

Paper 3: Testing Individuals with Disabilities: An International Perspective, Kurt F. Geisinger, and Carina McCormick 
While individual countries vary in their legislation affecting individuals with disabilities, there is a consistent set of principles that can guide practice for testing individuals with disabilities. This general framework remains consistent in a wide variety of settings. Accommodations are changes to the test format or administration intended to increase access to the test content for those with disabilities without altering the intended test construct. This paper provides guidance on determining whether accommodations would be appropriate in distinct scenarios by considering the overlap between the intended test construct, the disability, and the requested accommodation. This paper describes federal laws in the United States that influence testing practice and highlights the potential for the United Nation’s disability rights framework to provide consistency in assessment across countries. While specific laws outline what is required in a given context, accurate scores for all examinees are always important for the effectiveness of a testing program. The need for clear procedures for accommodated assessment is especially important when the same test is administered in different settings, whether the requested accommodation is possibily controversial, such as extra time, or a simple change to the test formatting, such as increased contrast on the page. The paper suggests principles that can improve the consistency, efficiency, and defensibly of procedures for making accommodations decisions and administering tests with accommodations in a way that is applicable internationally. Universal design is recommended as a way to ensure a wider variety of examinees are able to access and respond to the test material.

Paper 4: Indigenous Approaches to Testing and Assessment, Fanny M. Cheung and Velichko H. Fetvadjiev
This paper discusses the need for culturally relevant tools for testing and assessment in non-Western countries where it has been a common practice among local psychologists to adopt and translate existing psychological tests originally developed in Western countries. This etic approach assumes that Western theories and tools are universally applicable. Apart from the challenges of establishing equivalence between the original Western tests and the translated tests, the etic approach has been queried on the lack of relevance of some universal constructs which may be imposed on the local population. Furthermore, these Western measures may have neglected indigenous constructs that are important to the local population. The indigenization movement in psychology arose in response to the imposed etic approach. Several indigenization responses in cognitive and personality assessment are presented to illustrate the introduction of emic constructs and measures. The early emic approaches encounter many shortcomings. Studies on these indigenous measures are often limited in scope and lack comparison with mainstream measures. Questions are raised about the incremental validity of these emic constructs. Using the combined emic-etic approach, two large-scale indigenous personality measures have been developed in China and South Africa: the Cross-cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) and the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI). The development of and the research programs associated with these two indigenous measures illustrate the value of the combined emic-etic approach in providing a culturally sensitive model of personality for the local population while enlightening a more universal psychology through cross-cultural comparisons.

Paper 5: Norming, Dave Bartram and Fons J. R. van de Vijver
In this paper we focus on issues relating to norm-referenced measures and in particular the use of norms in international assessments. Much attention is rightly paid in the literature to issues of scale reliability and validity. Far less is paid to norming. This paper highlights some of the complexity around the issues involved in norming scores. While the initial sections of the paper review some general issues of norm construction and use, this is not a paper on the mechanics of how to produce norms. Rather we are focusing on issues of when and how to use norms, what aggregations of samples to base them on and how norm-referenced scores should be interpreted. In particular we consider issues relating to the development and use of international norms. Norms provide the scale that is needed to assign a value and meaning to the outcomes obtained by some operational technique or instrument. Test norms are often essential for all stakeholders to understand the meaning of test scores by providing information about the relative standing of the test taker relative to other members of his or her population. Finally, we recognize that culturally related variance may reflect either measurement bias or effects of cultural style. The challenge for researchers lies in differentiating measurement bias from cultural style effects.