Academic Achievement Assessments

Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (WJ-III):

Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (Woodcock, McCrew, & Mather, 2001).  The WJ-III is a standardized measure with established reliability and validity and applicability to a wide age range, beginning at age 3. The selected scales for language/literacy focus on emergent literacy and span the areas of decoding letters and words, vocabulary, and comprehension. The selected measures for math/numeracy span number recognition, simple problem solving, and simple math concepts.

WJ subtests used in this study:  Letter Word, Spelling, Picture Vocabulary, Oral Comprehension, Applied Problems, Quantitative Concepts, Academic Knowledge, and *Passage Comprehension (*1st gr only)

Self Regulation Assessments

Peg Tapping:

Peg Tapping (Diamond & Taylor, 1996). In this game, children are asked to tap a peg twice when the experimenter taps once and vice versa. The task requires children to inhibit a natural tendency to mimic the experimenter while remembering the rule for the correct response. Sixteen trials are conducted with 8 one-tap and 8 two-tap trials in random sequence.

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Head Toes Knees Shoulders (HTKS):

Head-to-Toes Task (Cameron et al., in press). In this task, which requires inhibitory control, attention, and working memory (though inhibitory control is the main focus) children are asked to play a game in which they must do the opposite of what the experimenter says. The experimenter instructs children to touch their head (or their toes), but instead of following the command, the children are supposed to do the opposite and touch their toes. The measure is available from Claire Cameron, who gave permission for us to use the measure for this project.

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Copy Design:

Copying Designs Test (Osborn et al., 1984). Children must copy “exactly” a series of simple geometric designs. Error scores are used to assess attention.

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Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS):

Dimensional Change Card Sort (Zelazo, 2006). In this reverse categorization task, children must sort a set of cards based on different sorting criteria given by the examiner. For example, the first sort involves color, the second sort involves shape, and the final sort is a mix of color and shape depending on whether a card has a border or not. An additional level was added during the first grade follow up that involved reversing the rules on the final sort listed above. This task is used to assess attention-shifting.

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Corsi Blocks:

Corsi Blocks Task (Corsi, 1972). The Corsi Blocks task is a visuospatial short-term memory task. Children point to a series of blocks in a pattern both forward and backward. The task has two forward series of patterns and two backward series of patterns. The length of the block pattern increases until the recalled pattern is no longer correct.

Click to view more information regarding the Corsi Block task