Date: 04-22-2021
Time: 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: Zoom
Topic: The Why and How of Performance ValidityTesting in Children and Adolescents: The Pediatric Performance Validity Test Suite (PdPVTS)
Presenter: Dr. Cecil Reynolds
Presenter Bio: Cecil R. Reynolds is an Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology, Professor of Neuroscience, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Texas A&M University. He is the author of over 300 scholarly publications, author or editor of more than 50 books, and the creator of numerous widely-used psychological tests including the Behavior Assessment System for Children, the BASC, the most frequently administered test of its type in the English-speaking world, the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales, the Test of Memory and Learning, the School Motivation and Learning Strategies Inventory, and 40 other commercially published tests. Dr. Reynolds is a past president of the National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN) and APA Divisions 5, 16, and 40 (Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics; School Psychology; and Clinical Neuropsychology). He serves on 11 journal editorial boards. He is past editor of Applied Neuropsychology, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, and of the APA journal, Psychological Assessment, and a former Associate Editor of School Psychology Quarterly. In April of 2015, he began a 6 year term as editor in chief of the new APA open access journal, Archives of Scientific Psychology, and in January of 2019 became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pediatric Neuropsychology. Dr. Reynolds has received awards recognizing him for excellence in research (e.g., the Lightner Witmer Award, the Senior Scientist Award from APA Division of School Psychology, and NAN’s Distinguished Neuropsychologist Award, the Academy’s highest award, and the APA’s Samuel Messick Award for Lifetime Contributions to Measurement Science). His service to the profession and to the youth of America has been recognized through the President’s Gold Medal for Service to NAN along with the Academy’s Distinguished Service Award, as well as the UNC at Wilmington 50th Anniversary Razor Walker Award for Service to the Youth of America and the APA Division of School Psychology Jack Bardon Distinguished Service Award, and the Nadine Murphy Lambert Award which is given only every 2-3 years for contributions to the field that are extraordinary in both depth and breadth, among others.
Program Description
The importance of performance validity and effort assessment in child and adolescent evaluations is increasingly recognized, and this is reflected in the rapidly developing literature on this topic. A surprising number of children fail performance validity testing across many settings, including special education evaluations, forensic cases (e. g., mild TBI litigation), assessments for testing accommodations and 504 plans, social security disability, and more. Contemporary research has provided information regarding the prevalence of invalid test performance among children and youth, the frequency that performance validity tests are used during pediatric evaluations, potential factors underlying children and youth’s failure to provide their best effort on testing, and the development of objective methods of assessing the performance validity in pediatric populations.
This training provides an overview of the current literature on pediatric performance validity assessment, with an emphasis on the need as well as methods for evaluating effort in both clinical and school settings when making diagnostic or classification decisions about children and youth based on scores from maximum performance tests such as measures of IQ, academic achievement, and a variety of neuropsychological tests. The training will also provide a detailed introduction to the Pediatric Performance Validity Test SuiteTM (PdPVTSTM), a new digital performance validity measure developed specifically for use with children and adolescents.
Learning Objectives
At the end of the training, participants will be able to:
- Explain the rationale and importance of including performance validity assessment in pediatric neuropsychological, psychoeducational, and related diagnostic evaluations whether the evaluation is completed for clinical or forensic purposes.
- Distinguish between measures of performance validity and symptom validity.
- Define the unique details of the development of measures of effort and performance validity.
- Describe the development and psychometric characteristics of the Pediatric Performance Validity Test Suite.
- Administer and interpret the newly available Pediatric Performance Validity Test Suite.