Ecological assessment of cognitive functions in children with acquired brain injury: A systematic review

Assessment of executive functioning in children and young adults treated for frontal lobe tumours using ecologically valid tests

“…Those ecological assessments of EF have been summarised recently by Chevignard, Soo, Galvin, Catroppa, and Eren (2012). Overall, three approaches have been used.…”

“…Among these, the BRIEF (Gioia et al, 2000) has been widely used in children with developmental, congenital or acquired brain conditions. It has good psychometric properties in ABI (for a review, see Chevignard et al, 2012;Gioia, Kenworthy, & Isquith, 2010). Parrish et al (2007) found that the BRIEF questionnaire, used to assess executive functioning in 53 children aged 8-18 years with recent onset epilepsy, was a better predictor of performance on the DKEFS (a battery of nine neuropsychological tests designed to assess EF) (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001) than the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) which is a parent-completed questionnaire that examines a broad spectrum of childhood behavioural and emotional problems (Achenbach, 1991).…”

“…Parrish et al (2007) found that the BRIEF questionnaire, used to assess executive functioning in 53 children aged 8-18 years with recent onset epilepsy, was a better predictor of performance on the DKEFS (a battery of nine neuropsychological tests designed to assess EF) (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001) than the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) which is a parent-completed questionnaire that examines a broad spectrum of childhood behavioural and emotional problems (Achenbach, 1991). The BRIEF has been recommended for use by the Common Data Elements working group (McCauley et al, 2012) for the assessment of EF in children following TBI in clinical and research settings, and it is very sensitive to EF deficits in everyday life (Gioia et al, 2010, andChevignard et al, 2012). However, concurrent validity with classical tests of EF is consistently low (Chevignard et al, 2012).…”

Much ado about norming: The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function

“…Since publication in 2000, the BRIEF has been widely used in school and clinical settings as well as in a wide variety of research studies involving children and adolescents who are typically developing and those with developmental disorders, medical illness, neurological disorders, and psychiatric disorders (for review, see Isquith, Roth, & Gioia, 2013;. It is one of the most sensitive measures to attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Reddy, Hale, & Brodzinsky, 2011;Toplak, Bucciarelli, Jain, & Tannock, 2008) and to changes following brain injury (Chevignard, Soo, Galvin, Catroppa, & Eren, 2012), has been widely used to assess outcome following a variety of interventions (Isquith, Roth, Kenworthy & Gioia, 2014) and is associated with academic performance (for review, see Roth et al, 2014). There are over 400 peer-reviewed publications supporting the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of the BRIEF.…”

Development of Attentional Functions in School-Age: Evidence from both Traditional and Computerized Tasks

“…Assessment issues have been raised regarding the ecological validity of the attention batteries as well as their sensitivity in taping the developmental trends in school age population. Specifically, traditional paper-and-pencil assessment tools have the advantage to mimic real world situations (Chevignard, Soo, Galvin, & Catroppa, 2012), but administration and performance recording heavily depend on the examiner's experience. Computerized evaluation, instead, offers time accuracy, reliable, randomized presentation (Schatz & Browndyke, 2002) and can override the immature verbal abilities of younger children through its button pressing requirements.…”