Practitioner’s Guide to Evaluating Change with Intellectual Assessment Instruments

While conducting research on intellectual and neuropsychological perfonnance of various patient populations across time, we became aware of the lack of information concerning practice effects associated with many widely used assessment instruments. Although test-retest data were available for almost all of these instruments, it typically came in the form of correlation coefficients and mean changes in performance between assessments was often absent. In a 1995 article (McCaffrey & Westervelt, 1995), we discussed a number of issues relevant to serial neuropsychological and intellectual assessment and concluded that clinical neuropsychological practitioners had few guidelines to assist them in interpreting change in a patient's performance across assessments. This volume represents our efforts at reviewing the literature between 1970 and 1998 and extracting the reported information on practice effects. The tables include the assessment instrument used, information on the subject/patient groups, the sample size fu}, gender, age, intervention, interval between the assessments, scores at both assessment points, and the citation. The tables reflect the existing published literature within intellectual assessment and, therefore, some instruments (e.g., Wechsler tests) comprise a majority of the tables whereas others (e.g., Raven's Progressive Matrices, Stanford-Binet) do not. The test index is arranged by the name of the test as reported in the specific article. We caution readers to refer to the original articles if additional or more specific information is needed.