THE DEVELOPMENT AND STANDARDIZATION OF THE EINSTEIN ASSESSMENT OF SCHOOL-RELATED SKILLS - A TEST FOR PEDIATRIC USE

Abstract

Although pediatricians are showing an increasing interest and concern with regard to children with learning difficulties, there is a lack of well-standardized assessment tools to aid them in identifying these children. The Einstein Assessment of School-Related Skills (EASRS) is a brief (7-10 min), easily administered screening instrument that measures reading, arithmetic, auditory memory, language-cognition, and visual-motor abilities of children in grades K-5. Standardization testing took place in the fall, 1985 and in the spring, 1986 on over 2300 children in regular education classes in grades K-5 and on almost 200 children in the same grades who had been diagnosed as learning disabled (LD) by the Committee on the Handicapped in their respective school districts. The sample was selected to ensure representativeness of the full range of academic ability, socioeconomic status, and sex, as well as various urban and suburban regions in New York State. Analysis for both the fall and spring revealed a high level of discrimination on the total EASRS score between the normal and LD samples in grades 2-5 (numbers of diagnosed LDs in grades K-1 were too small for analysis). The median percent of regular education children in grades 2-5 passing was 77.5% in the fall and 75.0% in the spring, while only 22.5% and 16.0% of LDs passed the test in the fall and spring, respectively. These data indicate that the EASRS is a powerful device in helping the practitioner screen and identify children with learning difficulties.