Comparison of volunteer and referred children on individual measures of assessment: A Native American sample.

Abstract

The WISC-III, Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT) and Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised (CELF-R) were administered to groups of volunteer and referred Native American students who attended the Page Unified School District. The volunteer sample was randomly selected from all Native Americans attending first grade. The referred group included students ranging in age from six to eleven years who had previously been identified for a speech/language and/or comprehensive evaluation. The purpose of the study was to determine if the development of local norms was necessary to accurately identify students who may be eligible for special education services. A comparison of the groups' score means and standard deviations for each of the tests is provided. In addition, correlations between the measures provide tentative evidence of how intelligence, achievement, and language skill correspond to one another for a discrete sample of Native Americans. The results substantiated research with other Native American groups with regard to the Wechsler intelligence scales. Both groups obtained Verbal IQ scores significantly below the normative mean. The Performance IQ scores earned by the volunteer subjects were slightly higher and their Full Scale IQ scores were just below the normative average. In contrast, the referred group obtained Performance IQ scores below and Full Scale IQ scores significantly below the normative mean. On the WIAT, the volunteer group obtained scores comparable to the normative group, whereas, the referred group indicated significant areas of need in math and reading. Both groups obtained scores significantly below the mean on the CELF-R. The volunteer group's scores on the CELF-R indicated better receptive as compared to expressive language skills but the referred group's scores were depressed on both areas. These findings suggested that the volunteer sample's score profile reflected the normal developmental trend for language acquisition more closely than the score profile of the referred group.