Group differences and individual classification accuracy associated with letter/word oddity problems.
The ability of 27 pairs of mildly mentally retarded and normally achieving 6- through 8-year-old students to apply an oddity rule to an experimental set of letter and word oddity problems was assessed. The mildly retarded group evidenced a markedly lower level of performance on all five experimental oddity problems, but they did evidence successful generalization to oddity arrays that visually were very different from those used in training. High levels (greater than 90%) of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive accuracy, and negative predictive accuracy were observed using only six cards. Only slightly lower (greater than or equal to 85%) values were obtained when using a cut-off score. This subset of six cards is, therefore, an excellent candidate for inclusion in a cognitive preschool screening test being developed for the early detection of children with mild mental retardation.
Scott
M S
MS
Mailman Center for Child Development, University of Miami, FL 33101.
Greenfield
D B
DB
Partridge
M F
MF
Gold
S
S
D000124:Achievement; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D012660:Semantics