Validity of the RIAS for Assessing Children With Traumatic Brain Injury: Sensitivity to TBI and Comparability to the WISC-III and WISC-IV

Abstract

Intelligence tests are commonly administered to children following moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales (RIAS) is a recently developed measure of intellectual ability that has a number of appealing features for assessing individuals with brain damage, but as yet has little validity information when applied to children with TBI or other forms of brain injury. It is therefore unclear whether RIAS scores are sensitive to brain injury and how they compare to older more well-established tests such as the Wechsler scales. The current article reports two studies that examine these matters in youth with TBI. The first study examined sensitivity of the RIAS to TBI in 110 children. Results indicated the TBI sample performed significantly worse compared with the standardization sample on all RIAS index scores. The second study included 102 children who were administered either the RIAS, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III), or WISC-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV; 34 children in each group). Comparisons among the RIAS, WISC-III, and WISC-IV groups indicated no significant differences among the measures on verbal, nonverbal, and Composite Index/Full-Scale IQs. Results provide support for the sensitivity of the RIAS to TBI in children and also suggest that IQs produced by the RIAS, WISC-III, and WISC-IV do not significantly vary from one test to the other, which is particularly true of the verbal and Composite Index/Full-Scale IQs.