Yesterday, at the end of a NASP paper session on CHC Cross-Battery (CB) assessment, Dr. Dawn Flanagan, leading expert on CB, made an interesting comment.
She stated that CB was developed prior to the emergence of a number of well standardized intelligence batteries (WJ III, SB5, KABC-II) that collectively provide "norm-based" composites of the major broad CHC abilities. Thus, she stated that the real value of the CB method should now morph towards supplementing CHC-designed batteries at the narrow ability level (e.g., trying to obtain a two-test Visual Memory composite when giving the WJ III would require supplementing the Picture Recognition test with another test of MV). I thought this was a very perceptive insight regarding the responsivness of CB methods to evolution of the major intelligence batteries.
Intelligent Insights on Intelligence Theories and Tests
Great thoughts, although I would ask about the time consideration? With over seventy-something narrow abilities, measuring narrow abilities twice reminds me much of what initially drove us away from Wechsler only batteries toward CHC theory (only it was broad abilities repeatedly while neglecting others.) I am wondering what might be the best harmony of assessing both areas congruent to the area of suspected disability, as well as areas that are dissident to the areas of suspected disability, without assessing so much that school psychologists are unable to complete the evaluations in a timely manner.
ReplyDeleteIt kind of reminds me of smaller groupings and such. Teachers say, "Sally works best 1 on 1", but that would be true of most students-it's just not practical. I would certainly not wish to engage in any practice that's not psychometrically or clinically sound...but am concern about the inverse relationshp between time and data.
John, the only reason I can think of for giving a second measure of a narrow ability is if you had some question re: the first measure. Like if I gave Analysis-Synthesis and Concept Formation from the WJ-III and the scores were 100 on CF and 70 on AS. Using CB principles, you would need to give another RG-Gf measure in order to see if the low score is for real. If they were both similar, you could assume that the kid’s Gf was where the cluster average said it was. If the additional RG measure (Logical Steps from the KAIT?) was a 70, you could safely assume that while his I-Gf was within normal limits, his RG is a deficit. Otherwise, you are putting too much emphasis on a single subtest. The benefit of so many new batteries being constructed using CHC is that the publishers are including more varied measures and not an overabundance of Gc, Gv, and Gs.
ReplyDeleteThat makes good sense. You would want to confirm the nature of that low score (or perhaps even get it informally...does this kid "not understand" when it comes to reasoning out those math problems?)
ReplyDeleteI think I'm going to solicit an intern and we'll just start doing joint assessments...
-J
Exactly. If a student does poorly on Concept Formation and WNL on An-Syn, one hypothesis could be that it was the (huge) language content of the instructions. You could then give any of the several matrix Reasoning subtests (like from the UNIT) to test that hypothesis...if he does WNL on the UNIT test, then An-Syn was affected by language (especially if he has Gc problems). If the UNIT measure was also poor, then you can safely rule it out. It jsut took one extra subtest to figure that you, not a whole nother battery.
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