Concurrent Validity of the Kent Scoring Adaptation of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development

Abstract

Early intervention legislation requires documentation of infant development in multiple domains as a part of the eligibility determination process. The Bayley Scales of Infant Development, a popular standardized infant assessment for eligibility determination, provides scores for only the mental and psychomotor domains. The Kent Scoring Adaptation of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development is a procedure for determining developmental ages in the following domains based on an infant's performance on the Bayley Scales: cognition, language, social, fine motor, and gross motor. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the concurrent validity of developmental age equivalencies obtained from the Kent adaptation procedure when compared to age equivalency scores obtained from the Battelle Developmental Inventory. Subjects were twenty-seven infants less than seventy-three weeks of age with risks for developmental delay. Kent developmental ages were highly correlated with and highly predictive of Battelle age equivalency measures. Significant differences were found however, between the mean developmental ages in three of the domains compared. The results of this study provide evidence supporting the concurrent validity of the cognitive, language, and, to a degree, the social domains of the Kent procedure. Concurrent validity of the Kent fine and gross motor domain measures were questioned and should be interpreted cautiously.