Evaluating Potential Test Components for a New Cognitive Screening Test: a Preliminary Study

Abstract

Four and five-year-old children, 22 with mild mental retardation and 27 with learning disabilities, were matched with normally achieving children of the same age, gender, and ethnicity. All were presented a battery of eight cognitive tasks being considered for inclusion in a new screening test. Five tasks were selected based on their high levels of classification accuracy. One of the selected tasks required the child to point to pictures in a systematic manner, one to find the odd or different picture, one to define a common word, one to generate items belonging to a specific category and one to verbalize differences among people. The results support the contention that a broad array of cognitive measures may enable more effective early identification of young children with mild learning problems.

Screening for Intellectual Disability in Children: A Review of the Literature

“…1995) and poor educational attainment (Scarr et al. 1994; Scott et al. 1998), or children with general disabilities (Zaman et al.…”

Using educational placement in third grade to select and validate a preschool screening measure

“…However, Deuel, M.S. Scott, Urbano, and Sanchez (1996) had examined the interrater reliability of the measures on this nine-task battery and there were large differences between the interrater consistency of the raters on the final tasks in each subset (i.e., the DMO and USI/fruit tasks). For the DMO task, an identification task, the two scorers were at 92% agreement of exact scores and at 99% agreement when their scoring was counted as a match if they were within one point of each other.…”

Identifying Cognitively Gifted Ethnic Minority Children

“…The quality of the child's pointing sequence on each of the four arrays was scored. Based on previous data (Scott, et al, 1996), two dependent measures were evaluated: a quality score which was the sum of the scores assigned to each of the four sequences (possible range = 0 to 12); and a penalty score which was defined as the quality score minus the total number of repetitions and omissions.…”

“…It mav have real socioeconomic impact, contributing to the gulf between mainstream and minority cultures and causing this gap to widen (Borland, 1996). Eligible for gifted, but unplaced, ethnic minority students, when compared to a similar group of eligible students who were placed in a gifted program, were more likely to have dropped out of school and less likely to have gone on to college (Smith, LeRose & Clasen, 1991 ). Such data clearly point out the necessity of finding a more effective means to identify minority and/or low income gifted children.…”

“…The battery had been developed to identify children with mild learning problems who would be at risk for academic failure (e.g., Scott, Deuel, Claussen, & Sanchez, 1993;Scott et al, 1996). If these cognitive tasks were effective in identifying low performing outliers, it was reasoned, some of them might also prove effective in identifying high performing outliers.…”