This chapter addresses cognitive assessment of deaf children and adults. Emphasis is placed on the psychometric properties (e.g., reliability, validity, norms, item analysis) of published intelligence tests when administered to this population. The use of intelligence tests with deaf people has a long history that can be traced back to the early years of formal intelligence testing aimed at identifying those students in need of special education due to “mental retardation.” Intelligence tests continue to serve as a primary component of the assessment process for special education. Practitioners who serve deaf children regularly are faced with the dilemma of choosing from a variety of published tests that often lack sufficient evidence of validity (i.e., that the test score represents what it claims to represent) for this population. There are several potential reasons psychometric evidence is lacking for tests when administered to deaf people. First, deaf people constitute a low-incidence population, and sufficient sample sizes are difficult to obtain to conduct the necessary investigations. Second, the deaf population is composed of a diverse group in terms of a variety of variables, such as communication modalities, degree of hearing loss, parental hearing loss, age of onset, etiology, presence of additional disabilities, race/gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and educational placement. Third, funding is often not available to support investigations by test publishers and independent researchers for low-incidence populations. Finally, many independent researchers may lack the skills both for working with deaf people and in psychometrics that are required to conduct the necessary studies. Thus, valid cognitive assessment remains a difficult dilemma for practitioners whose goals may include helping educators understand a deaf child’s intellectual abilities and educational needs.
Two questions motivated this study: (a) Does test familiarity influence teachers' judgments of their students' test performance? and (b) Does the disability status of students influence their teachers' judgments? Teachers (n ϭ 19) judged item performances for one student with disabilities and one student without disabilities (n pairs ϭ 19) from their fourth-grade classrooms. Teachers made judgments using (a) a mathematics test from the research version of the TerraNova CTBS Multiple Assessments edition, which is similar to the large-scale achievement test administered in numerous states, and (b) classroom-based math tests. Judgment accuracy was higher (a) on classroom tests and (b) for students without disabilities. Among less accurate judgments, teachers consistently underestimated the performances of students with disabilities. Students with disabilities performed lower on both types of tests. Student test performance accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in teacher judgment accuracy. Implications of these findings for future research and practice are discussed.
The present study examined the reliability and validity of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) for use with deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HOH) children. Psychologists ( n = 10) provided data for 128 D/HOH children who were assessed with the WISC-IV as part of routine assessments. All the WISC-IV subtests (8) and indexes (2) examined had split-half internal consistency coefficients that were higher ( p < .05) than the values reported for the normative sample. The mean Perceptual Reasoning Index ( M = 93.21) and Verbal Comprehension Index ( M = 80.86) for D/HOH children were lower ( p < .05) than the population mean ( M = 100). Of the 44 inter-subtest correlations calculated, 29 were significantly greater than zero. The results support the reliability of the WISC-IV scores for D/ HOH children, although the findings suggest that the Perceptual Reasoning Index may have a different meaning than Performance IQ for D/HOH children.
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