New Screening Tests to Identify Young Children at Risk for Mild Learning Problems

Abstract

Each of 34 prekindergarten and 39 kindergarten children with mild learning problems, those with mild mental retardation or learning disabilities, was matched with a child without learning problems on the basis of age, gender, and race/ethnicity. All children were presented the same cognitive screening test, which consisted of eight tasks. For the prekindergarten group, 91% of the children with learning problems and 91% of those without problems were accurately classified using a subset of five tasks. Two of these were identification tasks, where the children had only to point to choices provided; the other three tasks required children to generate verbal responses. For the kindergarten sample, the highest level of classification accuracy achieved for the children with mild learning problems was 87% and for the children without learning problems, 77%. These levels were also based on a subset of five tasks, but this subset consisted of four identification tasks and one generating task. Levels of classification accuracy were higher for the children classified as having mild mental retardation than for the group classified as having learning disabilities. Females had slightly higher scores than males on the kindergarten test, and the White/non-Hispanic group had higher scores than the other ethnic/racial groups on the prekindergarten test.