The Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) is the cumulative body of almost all of the state and provincial boards regulating psychology throughout the United States and Canada. For the past several years, the Association’s members have included 53 U.S. jurisdictions (50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) and all 10 Canadian provinces. The Association’s headquarters is located in Montgomery, Alabama, with an onsite staff of nine individuals and other consultants in offsite locations outside the State of Alabama.
ASPPB was born in 1961 as the American Association of State Psychology Boards. It was the product of the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Professional Affairs Committee on State Licensure. One of its first goals was to facilitate mobility for psychologists throughout the United States and Canada. It was obvious to those who first formed ASPPB that the bedrock of any mobility movement would be a standardized examination that would be taken by those aspiring to become licensed as psychologists. The Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) was created to meet this need.
The first EPPP was administered in 1965. Its acceptance among the jurisdictions of the U.S. and Canada was slow but steady, and by the mid-80's almost all of the jurisdictions in the two countries had adopted the EPPP as the entry level exam for licensure at the independent practice level.
The EPPP has grown over the decades. It is among the most researched, validated and defensible professional exams in all of the professions. From the beginning, ASPPB and the Professional Examination Service (PES) have been partners in producing this exam. While the ASPPB Examination Committee bears the ultimate responsibility for the content of the EPPP, the work of producing those forms and scoring individual exams, as well as providing all the statistics and other necessary back-up, has been conducted by PES. In 2001, ASPPB and PES, through Thompson Prometric, began to offer the EPPP in a computer administered format, which is the norm in almost all the jurisdictions of the U.S. and Canada today.
The Association has grown rapidly over the years and now supports not only its own Board of Directors, but another 14 committees and several task forces each fiscal year. ASPPB is highly regarded within the professional psychological community, and has liaisons with most of the major boards and task forces within APA and with other organizations in the profession. Many other psychological organizations, such as the APA Board of Directors, the Council of Provincial Associations of Psychologists (CPAP), the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP) and the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC), send liaisons to meetings of the ASPPB Board of Directors.
ASPPB holds two membership meetings each year. The Association holds its annual meeting of delegates in October, during which new officers are elected and other business is conducted. The remainder of the three-day meeting is devoted to educational topics involving administration, examinations, law and professional discipline.
Since 1985, ASPPB has sponsored an annual Midyear Meeting which focuses almost exclusively on educational topics that are of interest to board members, board administrators and legal staff, as well as members of the testing industry.
In keeping with its original goal of mobility, ASPPB now offers four mobility mechanisms to its jurisdictions and to individual licensed psychologists. The first is the ASPPB Agreement of Reciprocity, which is an agreement between jurisdictions to accept psychologists already licensed by a jurisdiction that is a signatory to the agreement. The second mechanism is for individual psychologists called the Certificate of Professional Qualification in Psychology (CPQ). Individuals who are already licensed in at least one ASPPB jurisdiction, and have met other important criteria, can apply. If they receive a CPQ, that certificate can facilitate their licensure in many jurisdictions of the U.S. and Canada. The CPQ program has been such a success that there a number of other jurisdictions that are in some form of progress toward acceptance of the CPQ. Third, the ASPPB Credentials Bank: A Verification and Storage Program (Bank)provides safe long term storage for documentation of professional education, training, and experience, oral examination or jurisprudence examination scores, transcripts and other vital information, and also serves as a source for verification of these items when the need arises. And last, ASPPB’s newly established Interjurisdictional Practice Certificate (IPC) has been developed to facilitate temporary practice.
ASPPB offers many services to its own board members, as well as to the community of psychologists as a whole.
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