The Scientific Method
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skeptika When the glass moved
The hypothesis inherent in Informational Testing is that a spirit can provide answers to questions at a specific time (during a séance) that cannot otherwise be answered. Tests are based on questioning the spirit and assessing the validity of the answers.
Examples of questions that could be used in Informational Testing include questions of the future, questions relating to the historical period which a spirit comes from (the spirit is actually a ghost in this case) and questions about something that you don't know that could be easily determined by an entity that is not constrained by physicality and could be confirmed with some effort on your behalf (for example, ask the spirit to go to a specific house and give you the telephone number and name of the inhabitants - then try ringing them). Alternatively you could ask a question that only one of the séance participants could know the answer to.
Unfortunately, none of these are the stuff of definitive tests.
For the first example, who says all spirits can tell the future?
How much do you know about historical things that happened ten years ago, let alone a hundred years ago? (Also, it is worth noting that history is written by people well after it happens, rarely while it happens and there often errors in people's recollection, not to mention conscious adaptation of the past to suit whoever is writing it or their perceptions of who might read it.)
What sort of abilities should you expect a spirit have? If, indeed, they can float on down the road and check out the neighbours, all well and good, but you cannot be sure that they can.
Finally, when asking these types of questions it is essential to provide a method of preventing fraud or autosuggestion. (There will always be a tendancy to ask questions that you know the answer to, if only subconsciously. When asking a question to which one participant knows the answer, there is a chance that that person will direct the movement of the glass subtly and the others will pick up the movement and amplify it in their enthusiasm to see what will be spelt out.)
The first suggestion I got to overcome these problems was from a skeptical friend. He suggested that you could somehow code or hide the letters before asking your questions.
One particular suggestion was to have all the letters shuffled, laid out at random, upside down, and given a numeric designation. After asking your questions you would write down the coded answers.
He sugested that if the answers then decoded into something cogent then that would indicate that it is not the participants who are moving the glass (or pointer), because the position of the letters would not be known to the participants.
The good part of this idea is that even questions that are known to all participants could be asked, or, alternatively, a question such as "Where is the 'E'?"
Mostly, though, I see downsides.
The session would consist entirely of single or grouped questions with no follow up. There would be no opportunity to seek clarification during the session because, to ensure that no participants know the code, the decoding would happen afterwards. It would be a very bland session, more like a marketing survey than communicating with the "other side".
Also, there is a few assumptions that may not be valid.
First and foremost, it is assumed that the spirit is more intelligent than the average human and can do coding on the run or has specific abilities. Even if the letters are merely upside down, rather than shuffled, there is an assumption that the spirit can read them somehow.
Secondly, we have presumed against one possible mechanism for the operation of the séance, that is that the spirit actually uses the mind of one of the participants to know where to move the glass to.
Finally, who can say that the spirit will want to engage in such a test anyway?
Personally, I believe that the best sort of test would be one in which co-operation of the spirit would not be mandatory, requiring a spirit to answer a list of prepared questions does not quite fit the bill.