The Application of a WISC-III Short Form for Screening Gifted Elementary Students in Canada

Abstract

This investigation explored the accuracy of a short form of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III} in predicting Full Scale IQ when administered as a separate test. The Dumont-Faro short form (i.e., Picture Completion, Information, Coding, Block Design, and Vocabulary; Dumont & Faro, 1993) was administered to 60 Canadian elementary students who were referred for gifted eligibility purposes. The remaining WISC-III standard subtests, coupled with two supplementary subtests, were administered immediately following the Dumont-Faro short form so that Full Scale IQ scores could be calculated. In order to determine the actual amount of time saved by using the short form, administration times were recorded for each WISC-III subtest. When administered as a separate test, the Dumont-Faro short form IQ scores correlated highly (.88) with the Full Scale IQ scores. Moreover, this instrument reduced the average administration time of the WISC-III standard battery by 55%. It was concluded that the Dumont-Faro short form is an effective screening instrument to use with elementary students who are referred for gifted eligibility purposes in Canada. This instrument can assist school psychologists in meeting increased service demands while still providing effective intellectual assessment.

Accuracy of WISC-III and WAIS-IV short forms in patients with neurological disorders

“…The subtest combinations were a priori selected, primarily based on psychometric results from earlier studies on clinical samples and the WASI-II. This resulted in Short Form 1 (SF1) to SF4 with regard to the WISC-III 18,[31][32][33][34][35] and in SF6-SF8 for the WAIS-IV. 15,26,36 For SF5, SF9 and SF10, the selection of subtests was indexbased.…”

Short Forms of Wechsler Scales Assessing the Intellectually Gifted Children Using Simulation Data

“…Most of these short forms have been constructed on the basis of subtests evaluating high-level cognitive abilities such as verbal comprehension and perceptive reasoning. Although there are short forms of the previous versions of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-R and WISC-III) as well as other sets of cognitive ability evaluations for the identification of IGC (Killan and Hughes, 1978 ; Dirks et al, 1980 ; Karnes and Brown, 1981 ; Ortiz and Gonzalez, 1989 ; Mark et al, 1998 ; for a review Simpson et al, 2002 ; Reiter, 2004 ; Pierson et al, 2012 ), to our knowledge, no short form of the WISC-IV or WISC-V has been tested with respect to its psychometric qualities in this atypically developing population. With respect to the use of shortened tests of cognitive ability as a decisional aid for the identification of IGC, Prewett ( 1995 ) suggests that shortened tests should generate scores that are comparable with those obtained with a battery of global assessment tests.…”