Low levels of agreement between adolescents and their parents or teachers on various cross-informant behavior rating scales have been reported in the literature. It is unclear whether one source of this inconsistency is adolescents’ tendency to underreport or overreport their behavioral problems relative to adult informants. The Child Behavior Checklist and its related forms were completed for a group of boys referred for school-based assessments due to academic and/or behavioral problems. Comparisons between the ratings of adolescents and their parents and teachers revealed little correspondence among informants, especially between adolescents and either their parents or teachers. Adolescents consistently under-reported behavioral problems relative to parents and teachers regardless of sub-sequent diagnosis (i.e., behavioral disorder, learning disability, or not diagnosed). Implications of this lack of agreement between adolescents’ self-reports and adult ratings in the school-based diagnosis of behavioral disorders are discussed.
The Symbol--Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) is widely used to assess processing speed in MS patients. We developed a computerized version of the SDMT (c-SDMT) that scored participants' performance during subintervals over the course of the usual 90-s time period and also added an incidental learning test (c-ILT) to assess how well participants learned the symbol-digit associations while completing the c-SDMT. Patients with MS (n = 65) achieved lower scores than healthy controls (n = 38) on both the c-SDMT and c-ILT, and the scores on the two tests were correlated. However, no increase in the rate of item completion occurred for either group over the course of the c-SDMT, and the difference between groups was the same during each subinterval. Therefore, it seems implausible that controls completed more items on the c-SDMT because they were more adept at learning the symbol-digit associations as the test ensued. Instead, MS patients' poorer incidental learning performance appears to reflect the greater attentional burden that tasks requiring rapid serial processing of information impose upon them.
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