The paper reviews and critiques the Adaptive Behavior Inventory for Children (ABIC) from the perspective of its utility in the assessment of adaptive behavior for special education eligibility. It is explained that the ABIC, a parent interview consisting of questions about a child's home and community activities, has recently been normed and used…

Local teachers and other school personnel in Hawaii expressed a need for operational guidelines to use in deciding whether or not to refer students for diagnostic evaluations for specific learning disabilities (SLD). This project was designed to evaluate whether the Windward Rating Scale (WRS), a locally-developed teacher rating scale of student…

Screening refers here to the process of making an initial selection of those who need further diagnostic evaluations. A screening process which effectively selects true learning disability (LD) cases from a population reduces the number of incorrectly selected non-LD children who would be needlessly given costly psychoeducational evaluations.…

Teacher ratings on the Aberrant Behavior Checklist were collected on 666 students with mental retardation attending special classes. Classroom placement and age had significant effects on subscale scores, whereas sex failed to affect ratings. The study concludes that the original scoring method, developed for individuals in residential facilities,…

A study examined teachers' and parents' ratings of 39 developmentally handicapped (DH) and 9 learning disabled children on the revised Vineland and the AAMD Adaptive Behavior Scale. Teachers rated children eligible for DH placement more frequently than parents. The adaptive behavior ratings of the two instruments differed significantly. (Author/CB)

This study investigated the procedures used by psychologists in a large midwestern urban area for the initial diagnosis and placement of elementary children with severe emotional disturbance (SED) in educational programs in light of the widespread criticism of the use of projective tests due to the questionable reliability of the tests and…

Six school districts in California provided data on the Public School Version of the Adaptive Behavior Scale for 373 children, ages three through six, who were enrolled in regular and trainable mentally retarded (TMR) preschool programs. The results of the study are reported as means and standard deviations of the domain scores for Part One and…

This normative study of the American Association on Mental Deficiency (AAMD) Adaptive Behavior Scale--Public School Version was based on 291 Texas public school children divided into 12 categories. The categories were: age, ethnic, or racial group (white or non-white), and assignment to regular classes or special education classes for the educable…

Adaptive behavior is defined as the degree to which individuals are able to function and maintain themselves independently, and meet the culturally imposed demands of personal an social responsibility. In 1969, the American Association on Mental Deficiency sponsored the development of the Adaptive Behavior Scale to provide a comprehensive…

The contributions of school classification--regular or educable mentally retarded (EMR)--sex, and ethnic status to domain scores from the Public School Version of the Adaptive Behavior Scale were investigated. Part One measures the development of personal independence in daily living, while Part Two measures maladaptive behavior related to…

This study determined whether or not there were significant differences between ratings of parents and teachers on the Adaptive Behavior Scale, Public School Version. Interviews with parents of approximately 150 white and Spanish-surnamed children from 7 to 12 years assigned to educable mentally retarded (EMR) classes were used in conjunction with…