Reliability and Validity of Generalizable Skills Instruments for Students Who Are Deaf, Blind, or Visually Impaired

Abstract

The study examined the validity and reliability of four assessments, with three instruments per domain. Domains included generalizable mathematics, communication, interpersonal relations, and reasoning skills. Participants were deaf, legally blind, or visually impaired students enrolled in vocational classes at residential secondary schools. The researchers estimated the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and construct validity correlations of three subinstruments: student self-ratings, teacher ratings, and performance assessments. The data suggest that these instruments are highly internally consistent measures of generalizable vocational skills. Four performance assessments have high-to-moderate test-retest reliability estimates, and were generally considered to possess acceptable validity and reliability.

Language and reading comprehension in middle childhood predicts emotional and behaviour difficulties in adolescence for those with permanent childhood hearing loss

“…Reliabilities were not available for deaf children on these measures. However, where studies have been conducted for the deaf, the reliabilities have been found to be as good, if not higher, than those of typically developing children: on a test of written grammar (Cannon, Hubley, Millhoff, & Mazlouman, 2016), on WISC IQ (Krous & Braden, 2011) and on Generalizable Skills Assessments (Loeding & Greenan, 1998). The reliabilities for the tests used were therefore taken from studies on typically developing children as follows: BPVS a = .93, (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton, & Burley,1997); TROG-2 splithalf = 0.88 (Bishop, 2003); WORD comprehension splithalf = 0.91 (Wechsler, 2005); YARC mean a = .87 (Stothard et al, 2010); parent-rated SDQ Total Score a = .82 (Goodman, 2001); teacher-rated SDQ Total Score a = .87 (Goodman, 2001); Raven's Progressive Matrices split-half = 0.94 (Styles et al, 1998).…”