Each of 37 prekindergarten and kindergarten exceptional children with either mild mental retardation or learning disabilities, was matched on age, gender and race/ethnicity to a child without learning problems. All 74 children were presented the initial version of a new cognitive screening test, which consisted of nine different tasks. Tasks were evaluated in terms of their contribution to classification accuracy. The five tasks selected were associated with high levels of sensitivity (86%) and specificity (97%). There was only a small decline in sensitivity (81%) and specificity (92%) when an external estimate of the hit rates was obtained. There were no significant performance differences related to either gender or race/ethnicity in this sample and the interrater reliability was high for four of the five tasks selected. These data indicate the potential effectiveness of this new test.
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