Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment

Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger, Alan S. Kaufman, Nadeen L. Kaufman

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118271889
• eBook ISBN: 9781118421185
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Quickly acquire the knowledge and skills you need to confidently administer, score, and interpret the WAIS ® -IV

Coauthored by Alan S. Kaufman, who was mentored by David Wechsler—the creator of the Wechsler scales— Essentials of WAIS ® -IV Assessment, Second Edition is thoroughly revised and updated to provide beginning and seasoned clinicians with comprehensive step-by-step guidelines for effective use of the WAIS ® -IV. This invaluable guide provides clinicians with a brand new interpretive process, overhauling its system of profile interpretation to be equally powerful across the entire WAIS ® -IV age range.

Like all the volumes in the Essentials of Psychological Assessment series, this book is designed to help busy mental health professionals quickly acquire the basic knowledge and skills they need to make optimal use of a major psychological assessment instrument. Each concise chapter features numerous callout boxes highlighting key concepts, bulleted points, and extensive illustrative material, as well as test questions that help you gauge and reinforce your grasp of the information covered.

The new edition explores timely topics including gender and ethnic differences, as well as the role of the Flynn Effect in capital punishment court cases. Along with an accompanying Website containing scoring tables and case report material, the Second Edition includes information and advice on how to administer Q-interactive ™ —the new digital version of the test—for administration of the WAIS ® -IV via iPad ® Essentials of Assessment Report Writing
Essentials of WISC ® -IV Assessment, Second Edition
Essentials of WMS ® -IV Assessment
Essentials of Cross-Battery Assessment, Third Edition
Essentials of WJ III ™ Tests of Achievement Assessment
Essentials of WJ III ™ Cognitive Abilities Assessment, Second Edition
Essentials of Neuropsychological Assessment, Second Edition
Visit us on the Web at: wiley.com/psychology

Chapter 1

Introduction and Overview

Introduction

The field of assessment, particularly intellectual assessment, has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades. New tests of cognitive abilities are being developed, and older tests of intelligence are being revised to meet the needs of the professionals utilizing them. There are several good sources for reviewing major measures of cognitive ability (e.g., Flanagan & Harrison, 2012; Naglieri & Goldstein, 2009; Sattler, 2008); however, the new and revised measures multiply rapidly, and it is often difficult to keep track of new instruments, let alone know how to administer, score, and interpret them. One of the goals of this book is to provide an easy reference source for those who wish to learn essentials of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) in a direct, no-nonsense, systematic manner.

Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment was developed with an easy-to-read format in mind. The topics covered in the book emphasize administration, scoring, interpretation, and application of the WAIS-IV. Each chapter includes several “Rapid Reference,” “Caution,” and “Don't Forget” boxes that highlight important points for easy reference. At the end of each chapter, questions are provided to help you solidify what you have read. The information provided in this book will help you to understand, in depth, the latest of the measures in the Wechsler family and will help you become a competent WAIS-IV examiner and clinician.

History and Development

The first assessment instrument developed by David Wechsler came on the scene in 1939. However, the history of intelligence testing began several decades before that, in the late 19th century, and is largely an account of the measurement of the intelligence of children or retarded adults. Sir Francis Galton (1869, 1883) studied adults and was interested in giftedness when he developed what is often considered the first comprehensive individual test of intelligence, composed of sensorimotor tasks (Kaufman, 2000b). But despite Galton's role as the father of the testing movement (Shouksmith, 1970), he did not succeed in constructing a true intelligence test. His measures of simple reaction time, strength of squeeze, or keenness of sight proved to assess sensory and motor abilities, skills that relate poorly to mental ability and that are far removed from the type of tasks that constitute contemporary intelligence tests.

Binet-Simon Scales

Alfred Binet and his colleagues (Binet & Henri, 1895; Binet & Simon, 1905, 1908) developed the tasks that survive to the present day in most tests of intelligence for children and adults. Binet (1890a, 1890b) mainly studied children; beginning with systematic developmental observations of his two young daughters, Madeleine and Alice, he concluded that simple tasks such as those used by Galton did not discriminate between children and adults. In 1904, the minister of public instruction in Paris appointed Binet to a committee to find a way to distinguish normal from retarded children. Fifteen years of qualitative and quantitative investigation of individual differences in children—along with considerable theorizing about mental organization and the development of a specific set of complex, high-level tests to investigate these differences—preceded the “sudden” emergence of the landmark 1905 Binet-Simon intelligence scale (Murphy, 1968).

The 1908 scale was the first to include age levels, spanning the range from 3 to 13. This important modification stemmed from Binet and Simon's unexpected discovery that their 1905 scale was useful for much more than classifying a child at one of the three levels of retardation: moron, imbecile, idiot (Matarazzo, 1972). Assessment of older adolescents and adults, however, was not built into the Binet-Simon system until the 1911 revision. That scale was extended to age 15 and included five ungraded adult tests (Kite, 1916). This extension was not conducted with the rigor that characterized the construction of tests for children, and the primary applications of the scale were for use with school-age children (Binet, 1911).

Measuring the intelligence of adults, except those known to be mentally retarded, was almost an afterthought. But Binet recognized the increased applicability of the Binet-Simon tests for various child assessment purposes just before his untimely death in 1911, when he “began to foresee numerous uses for his method in child development, in education, in medicine, and in longitudinal studies predicting different occupational histories for children of different intellectual potential” (Matarazzo, 1972, p. 42).

Terman's Stanford-Binet

Lewis Terman was one of several people in the United States who translated and adapted the Binet-Simon scale for use in the United States, publishing a “tentative” revision (Terman & Childs, 1912) four years before releasing his painstakingly developed and carefully standardized Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (Terman, 1916). This landmark test, soon known simply as the Stanford-Binet, squashed competing tests developed earlier by Goddard, Kuhlmann, Wallin, and Yerkes. Terman's success was undoubtedly due in part to heeding the advice of practitioners whose demand “for more and more accurate diagnoses...raised the whole question of the accurate placing of tests in the scale and the accurate evaluation of the responses made by the child” (Pintner & Paterson, 1925, p. 11).

Terman (1916) saw intelligence tests as useful primarily for the detection of mental deficiency or superiority in children and for the identification of “feeblemindedness” in adults. He cited numerous studies of delinquent adolescents and adult criminals, all of which pointed to the high percentage of mentally deficient juvenile delinquents, prisoners, or prostitutes, and concluded that “there is no investigator who denies the fearful role played by mental deficiency in the production of vice, crime, and delinquency” (p. 9). Terman also saw the potential for using intelligence tests with adults for determining “vocational fitness,” but, again, he emphasized employing “a psychologist...to weed out the unfit” or to “determine the minimum ‘intelligence quotient’ necessary for success in each leading occupation” (p. 17).

Perhaps because of this emphasis on the assessment of children or concern with the lower end of the intelligence distribution, Terman (1916) did not use a rigorous methodology for constructing his adult-level tasks. Tests below the 14-year level were administered to a fairly representative sample of about 1,000 children and early adolescents. To extend the scale above that level, data were obtained from 30 businessmen, 50 high school students, 150 adolescent delinquents, and 150 migrating unemployed men. Based on a frequency distribution of the mental ages of a mere 62 adults (the 30 businessmen and 32 of the high school students above age 16), Terman partitioned the graph into the Mental Age (MA) categories: 13 to 15 (inferior adults), 15 to 17 (average adults), and above 17 (superior adults).

World War I Tests

The field of adult assessment grew rapidly with the onset of World War I, particularly after U.S. entry into the war in 1917 (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997; Vane & Motta, 1984). Psychologists saw with increasing clarity the applications of intelligence tests for selecting officers and placing enlisted men in different types of service, apart from their generation-old use for identifying the mentally unfit. Under the leadership of Robert Yerkes and the American Psychological Association, the most innovative psychologists of the day helped translate Binet's tests into a group format. Arthur Otis, Terman's student, was instrumental in leading the creative team that developed the Army Alpha, essentially a group-administered Stanford-Binet, and the Army Beta, a novel group test composed of nonverbal tasks.

Yerkes (1917) opposed Binet's age-scale approach and favored a point-scale methodology, one that advocates selection of tests of specified, important functions rather than a set of tasks that fluctuates greatly with age level and developmental stage. The Army group tests reflect a blend of Yerkes's point-scale approach and Binet's notions of the kind of skills that should be measured when assessing mental ability. The Army Alpha included the Binet-like tests of Directions or Commands, Practical Judgment, Arithmetical Problems, Synonym-Antonym, Dissarranged Sentences, Analogies, and Information. Even the Army Beta had subtests resembling Stanford-Binet tasks: Maze, Cube Analysis, Pictorial Completion, and Geometrical Construction. The Beta also included novel measures, such as Digit Symbol, Number Checking, and X-O Series (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1920). Never before or since have tests been normed and validated on samples so large; 1,726,966 men were tested (Vane & Motta, 1984).

Another intelligence scale was developed during the war, one that became an alternative for those who could not be tested validly by either the Alpha or Beta. This was the Army Performance Scale Examination, composed of tasks that would become the tools of the trade for clinical psychologists, school psychologists, and neuropsychologists into the 21st century: Picture Completion, Picture Arrangement, Digit Symbol, and Manikin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Essentials of Psychological Assessment Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Series Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: One Introduction and Overview
• Chapter 2: Two How to Administer the WAIS-IV
• Chapter 3: Three How to Score the WAIS-IV
• Chapter 4: Four How to Interpret the WAIS-IV: Conceptual and Clinical Foundations
• Chapter 5: Five How to Interpret the WAIS-IV: Step-by-Step
• Chapter 6: Six Clinical Applications I: A Neuropsychological Approach to Interpretation of the WAIS-IV and the Use of the WAIS-IV in Learning Disability Assessments
• Chapter 7: Seven Clinical Applications II: Age and Intelligence Across the Adult Life Span
• Chapter 8: Eight Clinical Applications III: WAIS-IV Use With Special Groups, Practice Effects, and Gender Differences
• Chapter 9: Nine Strengths and Weaknesses of the WAIS-IV
• Chapter 10: Ten Illustrative Case Reports
• Chapter 11: Eleven The Initial Digital Adaptation of the WAIS-IV
• References
• Annotated Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the CD-ROM