MORE ON SHORT INFANT TEST

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

HERE ARE SOME MORE RESPONSES RE THE SHORT INFANT TEST:

> >
> > A PhD student of mine is looking for a *short* general cognitive infant
> > test.  She will have Bayley-II data on a total population, but in case some
> > subsequent experimental tasks are a little too removed from the date of the
> > initial Bayley testing, she wanted to run a *short* test to make sure that
> > there have been no major changes in test age in the less able vs more able
> > groups of infants. Can anyone suggest anything other than running the
> > Bayley again on the whole population?
> > Many thanks
> > Annette
> >

Hello,
Here is information on one more short cog test for infants,
courtesy of a pediatrician colleague, Valerie Burton,
vburton at com1.med.usf.edu
Sorry, it took me so long to answer.
Things are busy here (just like they are
everywhere else!)
the test I talked to you about is the Clinical Aptitude Test/ Clinical
Linguistic and Auditory Milestone Test (CAT/CLAMS).
It was developed at Johns Hopkins and correlates well with the
age equivalents obtained on the Bayley.
You can order it directly from the Kennedy Fellows Association.
                                                    P.O. Box 2004
                                                    Baltimore, MD 21203-2004
                                                    (410)614-6297

You can call and get more information and they can also send you an
order form if you like. It is a short test that splits out language
skills from visual-motor skills. It takes about 10-20 minutes to
administer on a child depending on the age. I use it for the children
in my Early Intervention Program here in Florida and the state seems to
agree that it is a good test and gives a reasonably consistent idea of
a child's functioning.
I hope this helps. If there is anything I can do to provide further information
just let me know. I know the test well and use it regularly. There is also a
video that can be ordered to assist with administration and usage.
Valerie Burton


  >
> What we all need is a short-form yet appropriately controlled response to
> novelty test that tapes some of the skills tested in the experimental
> habituation work.  I wonder if any of Carolyn Rovee-Collier's home-based
> experimental techniques to test memory could be adapted in this way.  Does
> anyone know of any measurement of individual differences in that sort of
> paradigm?  Or is there a short version of the habituation tasks ussed by
> Slater, Bornstein, etc., preferably ones that can be administered at home?
> Dale Hay

I don't know about a possible adaptation of Carolyn R-C's memory
procedure, but I have some thoughts on the Slater/Bornstein type of
habituation procedures.  So far I've been involved in 4 habituation
experiments whose aim was to predict later IQ.  One of these ( the first)
gave good predictive correlations, but the sample size was small (less
than 20) and the habituation data were collected from infants of
different ages.  Although we published this, it wasn't ideal.  The 3
others (2 of them in collaboration with Marc Bornstein) all gave very low
predictive correlations, for 2 of them correlations averaging around
zero, and for the other (with a sample of over 400 infants - part of a
major epidemiological study) gave correlations which, with stretching
(i.e., eliminating all infants who were not ideal during the habituation
phase of the study) gave the occasional correlation above 0.1
	Back in 1989 Roger Lecuyer wrote of the "0.05 syndrome", which is
that it's difficult to publish these sorts of data unless the
correlations are significant, so I'm sure that the published data are an
overestimate of the "true" predictive ability of habituation measures.
I wouldn't really recommend a short (or even long!) version of
habituation tasks as a meaningful measure of individual differences in
infancy ...
Alan Slater


Annette!
Maybe novelty prefernce is a possible measure (e.g.: the Fagan test of
Infant intelligence).
best
Mikael Heimann