Forty-one, 3-year-old children with mild learning problems (i.e., children already classified as having a learning disability, being educable mentally retarded or developmentally delayed) were matched to children without any demonstrated learning problems on chronological age, gender, race/ethnicity and testing language. The battery consisted of seven simple cognitive tasks that had been shown in previous studies to contribute towards the differentiation of children with and without mild learning problems. Using frequency distributions, a subset of four tasks was found to be associated with a sensitivity (percentage of all exceptional children falling below the cut score) of 95% and specificity (percentage of all normally achieving children with scores at or above the cut score) of 83%. Other psychometric properties associated with the four-task set were also strong. Similar data were obtained using the total sample of children tested.
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