Cognitive Assessment: BASC-2 and CBCL Assessment Tools

Cognitive Assessment
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BASC-2 and CBCL assessment tools
The Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC-2) (2nd ed.) is a multimethod multidimensional system to evaluating children’s emotional and behavior development through their self perceptions for those in 2-21 age bracket (McClendon et al., 2011). Other than self perception, there are rating scales involving teachers and parents. The approach also integrates the development history of children that is evaluated through questionnaires or interviews. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) is a psychosocial functioning instrument evaluating the psychometrical development of children and adolescents through personality categorized into externalizing and internalizing disorders (McClendon et al., 2011). The tool can be used for children of 6-18years, while there are also reports by teachers, parents and self reports for the older children (McClendon et al., 2011). Measurement constructs of reliability, validity and assessment interpretation
The reliability of the BASC-2 tool focuses on reliability through three different measures. For instance, internal consistency highlighting the alpha reliabilities it was in 0.90s range in case of composite scales while for individual scale it was 0.80s (Ellison & Semrud-Clikeman, 2009). The other reliability measure is test-retest reliability where the average correlations are taken into account. The other measure is the interarter reliability undertaken mainly for the teacher and parent scores. In the case of CBCl, the authors pointed out that the reliability of the tool was associated with the individual items interclass correlations (ICC) (Ellison & Semrud-Clikeman, 2009). There was a .89 test- retest reliability score for rating associated with mothers, and for behavioral problems it was .84 and in the case of social competencies it was .97. Even though, there were slight differences between the mothers and fathers scores, these differences were small and did to compromise the reliability of the tool (Ellison & Semrud-Clikeman, 2009).
The validity of evidence in any cognitive assessment tool is dependent on the content, internal structure and relation among the variables. The measures of the BASC-2 tool adhere to validity since, and the authors integrated information from teachers, parents, children as well as psychologists. The case for validity focused on convergence, construction and the discriminative aspects of the assessment tool. For validation, the rating scales provided were compared to similar tools to ensure consistency and establish correlations for factors under review. According to Ebesutani, et al (2010) one of the challenges of using the CBCL is that the scales may not necessarily be in accordance with the DSM manual, since the measuring the genera mental illnesses compared to specific DSM diagnoses in case of internalizing disorders. As such, the main concern with using the tool is that concurrent validity between the CBCL and DSM diagnoses may not tally. However there is validity and reliability of the externalizing and internalizing scores and the DSM –oriented scores.
Under the BASC-2 instrument there is a teacher rating scale (TSC), Parent ...