Performance of Children with Traumatic Brain Injury on the Cognitive Assessment System

Abstract

Children and adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI) were compared to a matched sample of neurologically normal children and adolescents on several measures of cognitive processing. Each of the children in the TBI group had experienced a closed head injury of moderate to severe magnitude. Participants in both the TBI (n = 22) and control (n = 22) groups ranged in age from 9 to 17 years and lived in the midwestern United States. They were all administered the Cognitive Assessment System (Naglieri & Das, 1997a). Children with TBI earned significantly lower scores in the domains of Planning and Attention than the matched control group. Within-group comparisons showed that the TBI group s Planning and Attention scores were significantly lower than their Simultaneous and Successive scores. The results are consistent with previous literature demonstrating poor performance on measures of attention and executive functions among children who have experienced TBI.

Absence of Adverse Effects of Severe Hypoglycemia on Cognitive Function in School-Aged Children With Diabetes Over 18 Months

“…It is reasonable to suspect that the CAS may have been insensitive to such effects. However, in previous studies, CAS scores were sensitive to retrospective parental reports of their children's frequency of SH (25) and to cognitive sequelae of closed-head injury (26). Administration of a battery including measures previously found to be sensitive to SH, along with the CAS, could clarify whether the present findings are specific to this battery or are more general.…”

“…A total of 9 years of psychometric validation of the subtests preceded its standardization with a large, carefully stratified national sample of 3,072 youth (21)(22)(23). Previous studies have shown that the CAS is sensitive to parental retrospective reports of their children's histories of SH (25), to closed-head injuries in children (26), and to subtle processing deficits found in learning disabilities (23). The CAS domains of cognitive function and their associated subtests are described below.…”

A Cognitive Neuropsychological Examination of the Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System Subtests: A Report of Three Stroke Cases Studied Longitudinally During Recovery

“…In Gutentag, Naglieri, and Yeates (1998) study Matching Numbers successfully discriminated between demographically matched control and traumatically brain-injured children with anterior pathology (Levin et al, 1989). Matching Numbers also discriminated between a nondemented demographically matched control patient and a right-handed 65-year-old-male vascular dementia patient with an aneurysmal infarct in the left frontal lobe (McCrea & Scott, 2002).…”

“…Performance on the Symbol Digit Modalities Test has been found to be significantly associated with neurodegeneration in the caudate in Huntington's disease (Starkstein et al, 1988;Sanchez-Pernaute et al, 2000) as well as with pathological symptoms associated with the substantia nigra in Parkinson's disease (Starkstein, Bolduc, Preziosi, & Robinson, 1989). Gutentag (1998) found that Planned Codes demonstrated the most pronounced decrements in performance in the TBI child sample. Ryan, Atkinson, and Dunham (2004) found that Planned Codes was successful in measuring executive function in a large mixed-sex sample of mean age 20.…”

“…The main differences between the TMT and Planned Connections are that the graduated level of difficulty of items in the latter (e.g., low floor and high ceilings) makes it well-suited for use in younger children (Gutentag et al, 1998) or perhaps older brain-damaged adults. Older examinees typically use complex strategies such as repeating the alphabet-number sequences covertly and these types of strategies were not generally used by young children (Naglieri & Das, 1997, p. 86).…”