Four and five-year-old children, 22 with mild mental retardation and 27 with learning disabilities, were matched with normally achieving children of the same age, gender, and ethnicity. All were presented a battery of eight cognitive tasks being considered for inclusion in a new screening test. Five tasks were selected based on their high levels of classification accuracy. One of the selected tasks required the child to point to pictures in a systematic manner, one to find the odd or different picture, one to define a common word, one to generate items belonging to a specific category and one to verbalize differences among people. The results support the contention that a broad array of cognitive measures may enable more effective early identification of young children with mild learning problems.
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