Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and behaviors or interests. Besides behavioral, psychopharmacological and biomedical interventions there is increasing evidence of non-invasive treatments like neurofeedback (NFB) that can improve brain…

Novel tests of semantic memory (SM)--for example, memory for news events (NE; news facts) or famous personalities--are useful for estimating the severity of retrograde amnesia. Individuals with mild cognitive impairment exhibit relatively intact SM/language on traditional neuropsychological tests but exhibit consistent impairment on novel tests of…

Research has indicated that school aged (6-16 years) versions of cognitive assessment instruments have varying levels of linguistic demand, which could impact assessment results for placement purposes. However, a significant limitation to this research is the fact that it has not been replicated with cognitive assessment instruments used in…

Fluency tasks are among the most common item formats for the assessment of certain cognitive abilities, such as verbal fluency or divergent thinking. A typical approach to the psychometric modeling of such tasks (e.g., "Intelligence," 2016, 57, 25) is the Rasch Poisson Counts Model (RPCM; "Probabilistic models for some intelligence…

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between measurements derived from spontaneous speech and participants' scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Method: Participants (N = 521) aged between 64 and 97 years completed the cognitive assessment and were prompted to describe an early childhood memory. A range of acoustic and linguistic…

The multiple-choice (MC) item format has been widely used in educational assessments across diverse content domains. MC items purportedly allow for collecting richer diagnostic information. The effectiveness and economy of administering MC items may have further contributed to their popularity not just in educational assessment. The MC item format…

This article proposes a class of cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) for polytomously scored items with different link functions. Many existing polytomous CDMs can be considered as special cases of the proposed class of polytomous CDMs. Simulation studies were carried out to investigate the feasibility of the proposed CDMs and the performance of…

The current study provides a methodological review of studies supporting a general factor of intelligence as the primary model for contemporary measures of cognitive abilities. A further evaluation is provided by an empirical evaluation that compares statistical estimates using different approaches in a large sample of children (ages 9-13 years, N…

The assessment of cognitive abilities has been the dominant activity performed by school psychologists since the implementation of the field. As such, the teaching of this skill to future psychologists is arguably the most important function of graduate education. Consequently, understanding graduate programs instruction in this area is extremely…

Albert Beckham, who was the first Black school psychologist in the U.S., frequently used intelligence tests with Black children. This usage required clinical decision making to explain the results obtained from psychoeducational assessments. In their discussion of this aspect of Beckham's work, introduce the concept of Culturally Relevant Clinical…

The aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool that measures critical thinking skills of university students. Pamukkale Critical Thinking Skills Scale was developed as two separate forms; multiple choice and open-ended. The validity and reliability studies of the multiple-choice form were constructed on two different…

Surveys reveal that many school psychologists continue to employ cognitive profile analysis despite the long-standing history of negative research results from this class of practice. This begets the question: why do questionable assessment practices persist in school psychology? To provide insight on this dilemma, this article presents the…

Background: Social perception is an important skill. One assessment that is commonly used to assess social perception abilities is The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The only normative data available for this test are for Australian younger adults. Despite no normative data being available for British adults, the test is widely used…

Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) is a type of educational assessment that is designed to measure specific knowledge structures and processing skills in students so as to provide information about their cognitive strengths and weaknesses (Leighton & Gierl, 2007). CDA has been instrumental in turning the attention of practitioners to more…

Purpose: Sentence processing can be affected following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to linguistic or cognitive deficits. Language-related event-related potentials (ERPs), particularly the P600, have not been described in individuals with TBI history. Method: Four young adults with a history of closed head injury participated. Two had severe…