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    Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment
    Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment
    Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment
    Ebook853 pages8 hours

    Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment

    By Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger and Alan S. Kaufman

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    About this ebook

    Quickly acquire the knowledge and skills you need to confidently administer, score, and interpret the WAIS®-IV

    Coauthored by Alan S. Kaufman, who was mentored by David Wechsler—the creator of the Wechsler scales—Essentials of WAIS®-IV Assessment, Second Edition is thoroughly revised and updated to provide beginning and seasoned clinicians with comprehensive step-by-step guidelines for effective use of the WAIS®-IV. This invaluable guide provides clinicians with a brand new interpretive process, overhauling its system of profile interpretation to be equally powerful across the entire WAIS®-IV age range.

    Like all the volumes in the Essentials of Psychological Assessment series, this book is designed to help busy mental health professionals quickly acquire the basic knowledge and skills they need to make optimal use of a major psychological assessment instrument. Each concise chapter features numerous callout boxes highlighting key concepts, bulleted points, and extensive illustrative material, as well as test questions that help you gauge and reinforce your grasp of the information covered.

    The new edition explores timely topics including gender and ethnic differences, as well as the role of the Flynn Effect in capital punishment court cases. Along with an accompanying CD-ROM containing scoring tables and case report material, the Second Edition includes information and advice on how to administer Q-interactive—the new digital version of the test—for administration of the WAIS®-IV via iPad®.

    Other titles in the Essentials of Psychological Assessment series:

    Essentials of Assessment Report Writing

    Essentials of WISC®-IV Assessment, Second Edition

    Essentials of WMS®-IV Assessment

    Essentials of Cross-Battery Assessment, Third Edition

    Essentials of WJ III Tests of Achievement Assessment

    Essentials of WJ III Cognitive Abilities Assessment, Second Edition

    Essentials of Neuropsychological Assessment, Second Edition

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateOct 22, 2012
    ISBN9781118421185
    Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment

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      Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment - Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger

      Series Preface

      In the Essentials of Psychological Assessment series, we have attempted to provide the reader with books that will deliver key practical information in the most efficient and accessible style. The series features instruments in a variety of domains, such as cognition, personality, education, and neuropsychology. For the experienced clinician, books in the series offer a concise yet thorough way to master utilization of the continuously evolving supply of new and revised instruments, as well as a convenient method for keeping up to date on the tried-and-true measures. The novice will find here a prioritized assembly of all the information and techniques that must be at one's fingertips to begin the complicated process of individual psychological diagnosis.

      Wherever feasible, visual shortcuts to highlight key points are utilized alongside systematic, step-by-step guidelines. Chapters are focused and succinct. Topics are targeted for an easy understanding of the essentials of administration, scoring, interpretation, and clinical application. Theory and research are continually woven into the fabric of each book, but always to enhance clinical inference, never to sidetrack or overwhelm. We have long been advocates of intelligent testing—the notion that a profile of test scores is meaningless unless it is brought to life by the clinical observations and astute detective work of knowledgeable examiners. Test profiles must be used to make a difference in the child's or adult's life, or why bother to test? We want this series to help our readers become the best intelligent testers they can be.

      In the second edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment, the authors present a state-of-the-art treatment of the WAIS-IV, an exceptional instrument that reflects a thorough, theory-based, intelligent revision of its predecessor, the WAIS-III. This book includes content and approaches from the two previous books that Lichtenberger and Kaufman published on the WAIS-III—Essentials of WAIS-III Assessment and Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence (3rd ed.)—while offering dynamic new interpretive systems and research that are theory-based, clinically rich, and innovative. The second edition, in particular, takes the interpretive system to a new level by providing in-depth Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) profiles for ages 70 to 90; previously, the CHC model was primarily targeted for ages 16 to 69. Furthermore, the second edition incorporates the array of WAIS-IV research investigations and test reviews that have appeared in the four years since the first edition was published. Two invited chapters that appeared in the first edition (George McCloskey's neuropsychological processing approach to WAIS-IV interpretation and Ron Dumont and John Willis's perspective on pros and cons of the WAIS-IV) have been thoroughly revised, and a new chapter has been added on the innovative digital version of the WAIS-IV (Q-interactive™) that permits computerized administration of the test. Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment, 2nd Edition also presents the latest research that examines changes across the life span on the four WAIS-IV Indexes—both the longitudinal research results detailed in the first edition of the book and the new cross-sectional data from two recent WAIS-IV studies. This second edition, fully equipped with a thoroughly revised CD-ROM to automate Lichtenberger and Kaufman's comprehensive interpretive method and to present a variety of additional tables and interpretive aids, offers clinicians who routinely assess adolescents and adults of all ages a cutting-edge resource that will promote intelligent testing in today's rapidly changing society.

      Alan S. Kaufman, PhD, and Nadeen L. Kaufman, EdD, Series Editors

      Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine

      Preface to the Second Edition

      We published the first edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment in 2009, on the heels of the WAIS-IV's availability in 2008. In an excellent review of the first edition of our book, Krach (2010) noted that we did not include research findings from the literature, but relied on studies in the WAIS-IV manual because such independent research findings had not yet appeared. Krach (2010) defended our decision to publish the book in such a timely fashion, stating: "It is preferable to have the [Essentials book] available as soon as possible following the test's publication rather than wait the years it might take for new, independent research to be available (p. 278). But she added: Perhaps a second edition of the book will be published that incorporates new research findings on the psychometric quality and clinical utility of the WAIS-IV, once such research findings become available."

      And that is precisely what we have done by developing the second edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment. A wealth of new research has become available in the few years since the publication of the first edition, and we have fully incorporated that research into the second edition. This new body of research allowed us to expand the coverage of timely topics, such as gender and ethnic differences and the role of the Flynn effect in capital punishment court cases, and to enhance our interpretive system for elderly individuals. Previously, we offered a solid interpretive system with a strong Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theoretical foundation for ages 16 to 69, but we had a less robust method of profile interpretation for ages 70 to 90. That has all changed thanks to an innovative factor-analytic investigation of the WAIS-IV (Niileksela, Reynolds, & Kaufman, 2012) that provides a five-factor CHC-based solution not only for ages 16 to 69 but for ages 70 to 90 as well. We have overhauled our system of profile interpretation to be equally powerful across the entire WAIS-IV age range and to emphasize that both the traditional four-factor and CHC-derived five-factor solutions are entirely compatible and do not reflect alternative views of the interpretive universe.

      In addition, the pros and cons chapter in the first edition was written by Ron Dumont and John Willis before any published reviews were available on the test, and the WAIS-IV process interpretation chapter was written by George McCloskey prior to recent developments in clinical neuropsychology. Dumont and Willis made notable changes in their chapter to reflect the thoughtful content of several comprehensive test reviews that appeared in respected publications, such as those of Buros, and to incorporate their ongoing clinical experiences with the WAIS-IV during the past few years. McCloskey updated his chapter, with new coauthors Emily Hartz and Katherine Scipioni, to incorporate the dynamic progress that continues to accumulate in the growing field of neuropsychological processing assessment and intervention. And we have added a brand-new guest-written chapter by Tommie Cayton, Dustin Wahlstrom, and Mark Daniel, that unveils the latest WAIS-IV cutting-edge innovation: the digital version of the WAIS-IV (Q-interactive™) that allows clinicians to administer the WAIS-IV via iPad.

      The most influential sources of new information, data, research, and research summaries that affected our development of the second edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment are the following:

      WAIS-IV Clinical Use and Interpretation, a 2010 edited book by Weiss, Saklofske, Coalson, and Raiford that included many innovative WAIS-IV research studies on gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, aging, and the Flynn effect, and that also included administration and scoring nuggets by the psychologists who developed the WAIS-IV for the test publisher.

      Essentials of WMS-IV Assessment (Drozdick, Holdnack, & Hilsabeck, 2011) and a special section of Assessment on advancing WAIS-IV and WMS-IV clinical interpretation (Frazier, 2011)—both of which offered fresh insights into the integration of the WAIS-IV and the Wechsler Memory Scale—Fourth Edition (WMS-IV). These tests were standardized together and, historically, are linked conceptually and clinically; both were developed by Wechsler and are routinely administered in tandem in neuropsychological evaluations of adults, especially the elderly. Data on integrating functional assessment with WAIS-IV in evaluating special populations was informative for groups such as adults with possible dementia (Drozdick & Cullum, 2011).

      An array of carefully crafted articles on the factor structure of the WAIS-IV that greatly enhanced the psychometric, theoretical, practical, and clinical understanding of both four-factor and five-factor solutions (Benson, Hulac, & Kranzler, 2010; Canivez & Watkins, 2010b; Niileksela et al., 2012; Ward, Bergman, & Hebert, 2012)..

      A special issue of the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment devoted to the Flynn effect (Kaufman & Weiss, 2010b). Since the first edition went to press, the Flynn effect has gained national prominence in capital punishment cases around the United States. It holds the key to whether a person who committed a capital offense will live or die. Our coverage of this key societal topic in the second edition is based mainly on the diverse articles by experts on this special issue.

      Authoritative, objective, well-thought-out reviews of the WAIS-IV (Canivez, 2010; Climie & Rostad, 2011; Hartman, 2009; Schraw, 2010).

      Recent state-of-the-art edited books on intelligence (Sternberg & Kaufman, 2011) and intellectual assessment (Flanagan & Harrison, 2012) that integrate and interpret the latest research and thinking about key topics covered in the second edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment, such as gender differences, CHC theory, aging and intelligence, cognitive interventions with elderly individuals, historical foundations, ethnicity, cross-battery assessment, information processing approaches to test interpretation, and confirmatory factor analysis.

      Our biggest disappointment in combing through the past four years of research on the WAIS-IV and adult intelligence in general was the lack of available studies with brand-new clinical samples tested on the WAIS-IV. Although some studies reported in the special section of Assessment devoted to the WAIS-IV and WMS-IV and in the Weiss et al. (2010) edited book involved clinical samples, the patients included in these samples overlapped substantially with patients in the samples reported in the WAIS-IV manual. Nonetheless, these new analyses on the old samples offered some fresh insights into the clinical samples that we incorporated into Chapter 8.

      Despite this limitation in the clinical research conducted on the WAIS-IV, the new second edition is a thoroughly revised and updated text that incorporates the latest, most compelling research and provides clinicians with a brand-new interpretive system and CD-ROM. It also includes a timely invited chapter on the digital WAIS-IV (Q-interactive™) that was written for this book before the publication of the Q-interactive™ platform.

      Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger and

      Alan S. Kaufman

      June 2012

      Acknowledgments

      We gratefully acknowledge the authors of three exceptional invited chapters that appear in the second edition of Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment: George McCloskey, Emily Hartz, and Katherine Scipioni, who contributed Chapter 6 on a neuropsychological processing approach to interpreting the WAIS-IV; Ron Dumont and John Willis, who contributed Chapter 9 on the pros and cons of the WAIS-IV; and Tommie Cayton, Dustin Wahlstrom, and Mark Daniel, who contributed Chapter 11 on the brand-new Q-interactive™, a computerized approach to WAIS-IV administration. (Chapters 6 and 9 are thoughtful revisions of chapters that appeared in the first edition; Chapter 11 is new to the second edition.) We are also extremely grateful to Matt Reynolds and Chris Niileksela for conducting state-of-the-art confirmatory factor analysis of the WAIS-IV to permit interpretation of a five-factor CHC model for elderly individuals ages 70 to 90; to Larry Weiss for reading early drafts of Chapters 1 and 5 and making important contributions to these chapters; to Diane Coalson and Susie Raiford for providing us with an array of the latest articles and reviews on the WAIS-IV; to Jack Naglieri and J. J. Zhu for conducting analyses that were needed to accommodate modifications to our new interpretive system; and to Wiley's Peggy Alexander, Marquita Flemming, and Sherry Wasserman for providing the kind of amazing support and technical competence that one can only dream of from a book publisher.

      In addition, we would like to acknowledge those people who were instrumental in the development of the first edition of this book: George McCloskey, for his chapter on the neuropsychological interpretation of the WAIS-IV; Ron Dumont and John Willis for carefully evaluating the WAIS-IV in their chapter on strengths and weaknesses; Clark Clipson and Shelley Lurie for providing outstanding case reports (retained in the second edition); Darielle Greenberg, James C. Kaufman, and David Loomis for their research assistance; Tim Keith and Jack Naglieri for providing important data analyses; numerous professionals at Pearson for their assistance and insights (Larry Weiss, Diane Coalson, J. J. Zhu, Susie Raiford, Jim Holdnack, Paul Williams, and Tommie Cayton); those who dedicated their time and clinical expertise to enhance the utility of the automated WAIS-IV Data Management and Interpretive Assistant (WAIS-IV DMIA) (Ron Dumont, John Willis, Howell Gotlieb, Richard Schere, and Steven Migalski); and Wiley's Isabel Pratt, who was vital to the success of the Essentials series.

      Chapter 1

      Introduction and Overview

      Introduction

      The field of assessment, particularly intellectual assessment, has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades. New tests of cognitive abilities are being developed, and older tests of intelligence are being revised to meet the needs of the professionals utilizing them. There are several good sources for reviewing major measures of cognitive ability (e.g., Flanagan & Harrison, 2012; Naglieri & Goldstein, 2009; Sattler, 2008); however, the new and revised measures multiply rapidly, and it is often difficult to keep track of new instruments, let alone know how to administer, score, and interpret them. One of the goals of this book is to provide an easy reference source for those who wish to learn essentials of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) in a direct, no-nonsense, systematic manner.

      Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment was developed with an easy-to-read format in mind. The topics covered in the book emphasize administration, scoring, interpretation, and application of the WAIS-IV. Each chapter includes several Rapid Reference, Caution, and Don't Forget boxes that highlight important points for easy reference. At the end of each chapter, questions are provided to help you solidify what you have read. The information provided in this book will help you to understand, in depth, the latest of the measures in the Wechsler family and will help you become a competent WAIS-IV examiner and clinician.

      History and Development

      The first assessment instrument developed by David Wechsler came on the scene in 1939. However, the history of intelligence testing began several decades before that, in the late 19th century, and is largely an account of the measurement of the intelligence of children or retarded adults. Sir Francis Galton (1869, 1883) studied adults and was interested in giftedness when he developed what is often considered the first comprehensive individual test of intelligence, composed of sensorimotor tasks (Kaufman, 2000b). But despite Galton's role as the father of the testing movement (Shouksmith, 1970), he did not succeed in constructing a true intelligence test. His measures of simple reaction time, strength of squeeze, or keenness of sight proved to assess sensory and motor abilities, skills that relate poorly to mental ability and that are far removed from the type of tasks that constitute contemporary intelligence tests.

      Binet-Simon Scales

      Alfred Binet and his colleagues (Binet & Henri, 1895; Binet & Simon, 1905, 1908) developed the tasks that survive to the present day in most tests of intelligence for children and adults. Binet (1890a, 1890b) mainly studied children; beginning with systematic developmental observations of his two young daughters, Madeleine and Alice, he concluded that simple tasks such as those used by Galton did not discriminate between children and adults. In 1904, the minister of public instruction in Paris appointed Binet to a committee to find a way to distinguish normal from retarded children. Fifteen years of qualitative and quantitative investigation of individual differences in children—along with considerable theorizing about mental organization and the development of a specific set of complex, high-level tests to investigate these differences—preceded the sudden emergence of the landmark 1905 Binet-Simon intelligence scale (Murphy, 1968).

      The 1908 scale was the first to include age levels, spanning the range from 3 to 13. This important modification stemmed from Binet and Simon's unexpected discovery that their 1905 scale was useful for much more than classifying a child at one of the three levels of retardation: moron, imbecile, idiot (Matarazzo, 1972). Assessment of older adolescents and adults, however, was not built into the Binet-Simon system until the 1911 revision. That scale was extended to age 15 and included five ungraded adult tests (Kite, 1916). This extension was not conducted with the rigor that characterized the construction of tests for children, and the primary applications of the scale were for use with school-age children (Binet, 1911).

      Measuring the intelligence of adults, except those known to be mentally retarded, was almost an afterthought. But Binet recognized the increased applicability of the Binet-Simon tests for various child assessment purposes just before his untimely death in 1911, when he began to foresee numerous uses for his method in child development, in education, in medicine, and in longitudinal studies predicting different occupational histories for children of different intellectual potential (Matarazzo, 1972, p. 42).

      Terman's Stanford-Binet

      Lewis Terman was one of several people in the United States who translated and adapted the Binet-Simon scale for use in the United States, publishing a tentative revision (Terman & Childs, 1912) four years before releasing his painstakingly developed and carefully standardized Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (Terman, 1916). This landmark test, soon known simply as the Stanford-Binet, squashed competing tests developed earlier by Goddard, Kuhlmann, Wallin, and Yerkes. Terman's success was undoubtedly due in part to heeding the advice of practitioners whose demand for more and more accurate diagnoses...raised the whole question of the accurate placing of tests in the scale and the accurate evaluation of the responses made by the child (Pintner & Paterson, 1925, p. 11).

      Terman (1916) saw intelligence tests as useful primarily for the detection of mental deficiency or superiority in children and for the identification of feeblemindedness in adults. He cited numerous studies of delinquent adolescents and adult criminals, all of which pointed to the high percentage of mentally deficient juvenile delinquents, prisoners, or prostitutes, and concluded that there is no investigator who denies the fearful role played by mental deficiency in the production of vice, crime, and delinquency (p. 9). Terman also saw the potential for using intelligence tests with adults for determining vocational fitness, but, again, he emphasized employing a psychologist...to weed out the unfit or to determine the minimum ‘intelligence quotient’ necessary for success in each leading occupation (p. 17).

      Perhaps because of this emphasis on the assessment of children or concern with the lower end of the intelligence distribution, Terman (1916) did not use a rigorous methodology for constructing his adult-level tasks. Tests below the 14-year level were administered to a fairly representative sample of about 1,000 children and early adolescents. To extend the scale above that level, data were obtained from 30 businessmen, 50 high school students, 150 adolescent delinquents, and 150 migrating unemployed men. Based on a frequency distribution of the mental ages of a mere 62 adults (the 30 businessmen and 32 of the high school students above age 16), Terman partitioned the graph into the Mental Age (MA) categories: 13 to 15 (inferior adults), 15 to 17 (average adults), and above 17 (superior adults).

      World War I Tests

      The field of adult assessment grew rapidly with the onset of World War I, particularly after U.S. entry into the war in 1917 (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997; Vane & Motta, 1984). Psychologists saw with increasing clarity the applications of intelligence tests for selecting officers and placing enlisted men in different types of service, apart from their generation-old use for identifying the mentally unfit. Under the leadership of Robert Yerkes and the American Psychological Association, the most innovative psychologists of the day helped translate Binet's tests into a group format. Arthur Otis, Terman's student, was instrumental in leading the creative team that developed the Army Alpha, essentially a group-administered Stanford-Binet, and the Army Beta, a novel group test composed of nonverbal tasks.

      Yerkes (1917) opposed Binet's age-scale approach and favored a point-scale methodology, one that advocates selection of tests of specified, important functions rather than a set of tasks that fluctuates greatly with age level and developmental stage. The Army group tests reflect a blend of Yerkes's point-scale approach and Binet's notions of the kind of skills that should be measured when assessing mental ability. The Army Alpha included the Binet-like tests of Directions or Commands, Practical Judgment, Arithmetical Problems, Synonym-Antonym, Dissarranged Sentences, Analogies, and Information. Even the Army Beta had subtests resembling Stanford-Binet tasks: Maze, Cube Analysis, Pictorial Completion, and Geometrical Construction. The Beta also included novel measures, such as Digit Symbol, Number Checking, and X-O Series (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1920). Never before or since have tests been normed and validated on samples so large; 1,726,966 men were tested (Vane & Motta, 1984).

      Another intelligence scale was developed during the war, one that became an alternative for those who could not be tested validly by either the Alpha or Beta. This was the Army Performance Scale Examination, composed of tasks that would become the tools of the trade for clinical psychologists, school psychologists, and neuropsychologists into the 21st century: Picture Completion, Picture Arrangement, Digit Symbol, and Manikin and Feature Profile (Object Assembly). Except for Block Design (developed by Kohs in 1923), Army Performance Scale Examination was added to the Army battery to prove conclusively that a man was weakminded and not merely indifferent or malingering (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1920, p. 10).

      Wechsler's Creativity

      In the mid-1930s, David Wechsler became a prominent player in the field of assessment by blending his strong clinical skills and statistical training (he studied under Charles Spearman and Karl Pearson in England) with his extensive experience in testing, gained as a World War I examiner. He assembled a test battery that comprised subtests developed primarily by Binet and World War I psychologists. His Verbal Scale was essentially a Yerkes point-scale adaptation of Stanford-Binet tasks; his Performance Scale, like other similar nonverbal batteries of the 1920s and 1930s (Cornell & Coxe, 1934; Pintner & Paterson, 1925), was a near replica of the tasks and items making up the individually administered Army Performance Scale Examination.

      In essence, Wechsler took advantage of tasks developed by others for nonclinical purposes to develop a clinical test battery. He paired verbal tests that were fine-tuned to discriminate among children of different ages with nonverbal tests that were created for adult males who had flunked both the Alpha and Beta exams—nonverbal tests that were intended to distinguish between the unmotivated and the hopelessly deficient. Like Terman, Wechsler had the same access to the available tests as did other psychologists; like Terman and Binet before him, Wechsler succeeded because he was a visionary, a man able to anticipate the needs of practitioners in the field.

      While others hoped intelligence tests would be psychometric tools used to subdivide retarded individuals into whatever number of categories was currently in vogue, Wechsler saw the tests as dynamic clinical instruments. While others looked concretely at intelligence tests as predictors of school success or guides to occupational choice, Wechsler looked abstractly at the tests as a mirror to the hidden personality. With the Great War over, many psychologists returned to a focus on IQ testing as a means of childhood assessment; Wechsler (1939), however, developed the first form of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale exclusively for adolescents and adults.

      Most psychologists saw little need for nonverbal tests when assessing English-speaking individuals other than illiterates. How could it be worth 2 or 3 minutes to administer a single puzzle or block-design item when 10 or 15 verbal items could be given in the same time? Some test developers (e.g., Cornell & Coxe, 1934) felt that Performance scales might be useful for normal, English-speaking people to provide more varied situations than are provided by verbal tests (p. 9) and to test the hypothesis that there is a group factor underlying general concrete ability, which is of importance in the concept of general intelligence (p. 10).

      Wechsler was less inclined to wait a generation for data to accumulate. He followed his clinical instincts and not only advocated for the administration of a standard battery of nonverbal tests to everyone but also placed the Performance Scale on an equal footing with the more respected Verbal Scale. Both scales would constitute a complete Wechsler-Bellevue battery, and each would contribute equally to the overall intelligence score.

      Wechsler also had the courage to challenge the Stanford-Binet monopoly, a boldness not unlike Binet's when the French scientist created his own forum (the journal L'Année Psychologique) to challenge the preferred but simplistic Galton sensorimotor approach to intelligence (Kaufman, 2000b). Wechsler met the same type of resistance as Binet, who had had to wait until the French Ministry of Public Instruction published his Binet-Simon Scale. When Wechsler's initial efforts to find a publisher for his two-pronged intelligence test failed, he had no cabinet minister to turn to, so he took matters into his own hands. With a small team of colleagues, he standardized Form I of the Wechsler-Bellevue by himself. Realizing that stratification on socioeconomic background was more crucial than obtaining regional representation, he managed to secure a well-stratified sample from Brooklyn, New York (Kaufman, 2009).

      The Psychological Corporation agreed to publish Wechsler's battery once it had been standardized, and the rest is history. Although an alternative form of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1946) was no more successful than Terman and Merrill's (1937) ill-fated Form M, a subsequent downward extension of Form II of the Wechsler-Bellevue (to cover the age range 5 to 15 instead of 10 to 59) produced the wildly successful Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC; Wechsler, 1949). Although the Wechsler scales did not initially surpass the Stanford-Binet in popularity, instead serving an apprenticeship to the master in the 1940s and 1950s, the WISC and the subsequent revision of the Wechsler-Bellevue, Form I (WAIS; Wechsler, 1955), triumphed in the 1960s. According to Kaufman: With the increasing stress on the psychoeducational assessment of learning disabilities in the 1960s, and on neuropsychological evaluation in the 1970s, the Verbal-Performance (V-P) IQ discrepancies and subtest profiles yielded by Wechsler's scales were waiting and ready to overtake the one-score Binet (Kaufman, 1983, p. 107).

      Irony runs throughout the history of testing. Galton developed statistics to study relationships between variables—statistics that proved to be forerunners of the coefficient of correlation, later perfected by his friend Pearson (DuBois, 1970). The ultimate downfall of Galton's system of testing can be traced directly to coefficients of correlation, which were too low in some crucial (but, ironically, poorly designed) studies of the relationships among intellectual variables (Sharp, –99; Wissler, 1901). Similarly, Terman succeeded with the Stanford-Binet while the Goddard-Binet (Goddard, 1911), the Herring-Binet (Herring, 1922), and other Binet-Simon adaptations failed because Terman was sensitive to practitioners’ needs. He patiently withheld a final version of his Stanford revision until he was certain that each task was placed appropriately at an age level consistent with the typical functioning of representative samples of U.S. children.

      Terman continued his careful test development and standardization techniques with the first revised version of the Stanford-Binet (Terman & Merrill, 1937), but four years after his death in 1956, his legacy was devalued when the next revision of the Stanford-Binet merged Forms L and M without a standardization of the newly formed battery (Terman & Merrill, 1960). The following version saw a restandardization of the instrument but without a revision of the placement of tasks at each age level (Terman & Merrill, 1973). Unfortunately for the Binet, the abilities of children and adolescents had changed fairly dramatically in the course of a generation, so the 5-year level of tasks (for example) was now passed by the average 4-year-old.

      Terman's methods had been ignored by his successors. The ironic outcome was that Wechsler's approach to assessment triumphed, at least in part because the editions of the Stanford-Binet in the 1960s and 1970s were beset by the same type of flaws as those of Terman's competitors in the 1910s. The fourth edition of the Stanford-Binet (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986) attempted to correct these problems and even adopted Wechsler's multisubtest, multiscale format; the fifth edition (Roid, 2003) is theory-based and of exceptional psychometric quality. However, these improvements in the Binet were too little and too late to reclaim the throne it had shared for decades with Wechsler's scales.

      WAIS-IV and Its Predecessors

      The first in the Wechsler series of tests was the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1939), so named because Wechsler was the chief psychologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City (a position he held from 1932 to 1967). That first test, followed in 1946 by Form II of the Wechsler-Bellevue, had as a key innovation the use of deviation IQs (standard scores), which were psychometrically superior to the mental age divided by chronological age (MA/CA) formula that Terman had used to compute IQ. The Don't Forget box that follows shows the history of Wechsler's scales. The WAIS-IV is the great-great-grandchild of the original 1939 Wechsler-Bellevue Form I; it is also a cousin of the WISC-IV, which traces its lineage to Form II of the Wechsler-Bellevue.

      Don't Forget

      History of Wechsler Intelligence Scales

      As prodigious as Wechsler's contribution was to the assessment of children and adolescents, his impact on adult assessment might have been profound. As (Kaufman, 2010a) stated:

      For the first Stanford-Binet, Terman's (1916) adult sample was small, haphazard, and unrepresentative. . . . The Average Adult level was derived from the mental ages for 62 adults. . . . Just as incredibly, Terman and Merrill (1937) tested no one above age 18 years for the standardization sample of Forms L and M of the Stanford-Binet. . . . For the revised Stanford-Binet, A mental age of fifteen years represents the norm for all subjects who are sixteen years of age or older. (p. 30)

      Dr Wechsler was not deterred by the difficulties in identifying representative samples of adults when he developed the Wechsler-Bellevue in the 1930s for ages 7 to 70 years. . . . For all practical purposes, Dr Wechsler developed the first real test of intelligence for adults in 1939, even though the Binet had been used to assess the mental ability of the adult population for a generation. (pp. xiv–xv)

      The development of Wechsler's tests was originally based on practical and clinical perspectives rather than on theory per se. (The origin of each of the WAIS-IV subtests is shown in Rapid Reference 1.1.) Wechsler's view of IQ tests was that they were a way to peer into an individual's personality. Years after the development of the original Wechsler scales, extensive theoretical speculations have been made about the nature and meaning of these tests and their scores, and the newest WAIS-IV subtests were developed with specific theory in mind. However, the original Wechsler tasks were developed without regard to theory. Nonetheless, his influence continues to reverberate. He was one of the founders of the field of clinical psychology (Wasserman, 2012); his tests and clinical approach have changed the lives of an infinite number of children, adolescents, and adults referred for evaluation for nearly a century (Kaufman, in press). As Matarazzo (1981) aptly stated, "Probably the work of no other psychologists, including Freud or Pavlov, has so directly impinged upon the lives of so many people" (p. 1542).

      Rapid Reference 1.1

      Origin of WAIS-IV Subtests

      Wechsler-Bellevue Subtests That Survive on the WAIS-IV

      Wechsler selected tasks for the Wechsler-Bellevue from among the numerous tests available in the 1930s, many of which were developed to meet the assessment needs of World War I. Although Wechsler chose not to develop new subtests for his intelligence battery, his selection process incorporated a blend of clinical, practical, and empirical factors. His rationale for each of the nine well-known original Wechsler-Bellevue subtests that survive to the present day on the WAIS-IV is discussed in the sections that follow.¹ (Note: The WAIS-III contained three new subtests that were not part of the earlier Wechsler batteries: Letter-Number Sequencing, Symbol Search, and Matrix Reasoning. The WAIS-IV contains three additional new subtests: Visual Puzzles, Figure Weights, and Cancellation. Subtests that were not a part of the original Wechsler batteries are discussed in separate sections of this chapter and in later chapters.)

      Similarities (Verbal Comprehension Index)

      Wechsler (1958) noted that before the Wechsler-Bellevue (W-B), similarities questions have been used very sparingly in the construction of previous scales...[despite being] one of the most reliable measures of intellectual ability (p. 72). Wechsler felt that this omission was probably due to the belief that language and vocabulary were necessarily too crucial in determining successful performance. However,

      while a certain degree of verbal comprehension is necessary for even minimal performance, sheer word knowledge need only be a minor factor. More important is the individual's ability to perceive the common elements of the terms he or she is asked to compare and, at higher levels, his or her ability to bring them under a single concept. (Wechsler, 1958, p. 73)

      A glance at the most difficult items on the W-B I, WAIS, WAIS-R, and WAIS-III Similarities subtests (fly-tree, praise-punishment) makes it evident that Wechsler was successful in his goal of increasing the difficulty of test items without resorting to esoteric or unfamiliar words (p. 73).

      Wechsler (1958) saw several merits in the Similarities subtest: It is easy to administer, has an interest appeal for adults, has a high g loading, sheds light on the logical nature of the person's thinking processes, and provides other qualitative information as well. Regarding the latter point, he stressed the

      obvious difference both as to maturity and as to level of thinking between the individual who says that a banana and an orange are alike because they both have a skin, and the individual who says that they are both fruit....But it is remarkable how large a percentage of adults never get beyond the superficial type of response. (Wechsler, 1958, p. 73)

      Consequently, Wechsler considered his 0–1–2 scoring system to be an important innovation to allow simple discrimination between high-level and low-level responses to the same item. He also found his multipoint system helpful in providing insight into the evenness of a person's intellectual development. Whereas some individuals earn almost all 1s, others earn a mixture of 0, 1, and 2 scores. The former are likely to bespeak individuals of consistent ability, but of a type from which no high grade of intellectual work may be expected; the latter, while erratic, have many more possibilities (p. 74).

      Vocabulary (Verbal Comprehension Index)

      Contrary to lay opinion, the size of a person's vocabulary is not only an index of schooling, but also an excellent measure of general intelligence. Its excellence as a test of intelligence may stem from the fact that the number of words a person knows is at once a measure of learning ability, fund of verbal information and of the general range of the person's ideas. (Wechsler, 1958, p. 84)

      The Vocabulary subtest formed an essential component of Binet's scales and the WAIS, but, surprisingly, this task, which has become prototypical of Wechsler's definition of verbal intelligence, was not a regular W-B I subtest. In deference to the objection that the word knowledge is necessarily influenced by...educational and cultural opportunities (p. 84), Wechsler included Vocabulary only as an alternative test during the early stages of W-B I standardization. Consequently, the W-B I was at first a 10-subtest battery, and Vocabulary was excluded from analyses of W-B I standardization data, such as factor analyses and correlations between subtest score and total score. Based on Wechsler's (1944) reconsideration of the value of Vocabulary and concomitant urging of examiners to administer it routinely, Vocabulary soon became a regular W-B I component. When the W-B II was developed, 33 of the 42 W-B I words were included in that battery's Vocabulary subtest. Since many W-B I words were therefore included in the WISC when the W-B II was revised and restandardized to become the Wechsler children's scale in 1949, Wechsler (1955) decided to include an all-new Vocabulary subtest when the W-B I was converted to the WAIS.

      This lack of overlap between the W-B I Vocabulary subtest and the task of the same name on the WAIS, WAIS-R, WAIS-III, and WAIS-IV is of some concern regarding the continuity of measurement from the W-B I to its successors. Wechsler (1958) noted:

      The WAIS list contains a larger percentage of action words (verbs). The only thing that can be said so far about this difference is that while responses given to verbs are easier to score, those elicited by substantives are frequently more significant diagnostically. (pp. 84–85)

      This difference in diagnostic significance is potentially important because Wechsler found Vocabulary so valuable, in part because of its qualitative aspects: The type of word on which a subject passes or fails is always of some significance (p. 85), yielding information about reasoning ability, degree of abstraction, cultural milieu, educational background, coherence of thought processes, and the like.

      Nonetheless, Wechsler was careful to ensure that the various qualitative aspects of Vocabulary performance had a minimal impact on quantitative score:

      What counts is the number of words that a person knows. Any recognized meaning is acceptable, and there is no penalty for inelegance of language. So long as the subjects show that they know what a word means, they are credited with a passing score. (1958, p. 85)

      Information (Verbal Comprehension Index)

      Wechsler (1958) included a subtest designed to tap a person's range of general information, despite the obvious objection that the amount of knowledge which a person possesses depends in no small degree upon his or her education and cultural opportunities (p. 65). Wechsler had noted the surprising finding that the fact-oriented information test in the Army Alpha group examination had among the highest correlations with various estimates of intelligence:

      It correlated . . . much better with the total score than did the Arithmetical Reasoning, the test of Disarranged Sentences, and even the Analogies Test, all of which had generally been considered much better tests of intelligence....The fact is, all objections considered, the range of a person's knowledge is generally a very good indication of his or her intellectual capacity. (1958, p. 65)

      Wechsler was also struck by a variety of psychometric properties of the Army Alpha Information Test compared to other tasks (excellent distribution curve, small percentage of zero scores, lack of pile-up of maximum scores), and the long history of similar factual information tests being the stock in trade of mental examinations, and...widely used by psychiatrists in estimating the intellectual level of patients (p. 65).

      Always the astute clinician, Wechsler (1958) was aware that the choice of items determined the value of the Information subtest as an effective measure of intelligence. Items must not be chosen whimsically or arbitrarily but must be developed with several important principles in mind, the most essential being that, generally, the items should call for the sort of knowledge that average individuals with average opportunity may be able to acquire for themselves (p. 65). Wechsler usually tried to avoid specialized and academic knowledge, historical dates, and names of famous individuals, but there are many exceptions to the rule, and in the long run each item must be tried out separately (p. 66). Thus, he preferred an item such as What is the height of the average American woman? to ones like What is iambic tetrameter? or In what year was George Washington born? but occasionally items of the latter type appeared in his Information subtest. Wechsler was especially impressed with the exceptional psychometric properties of the Army Alpha Information Test in view of the fact that the individual items on [it] left much to be desired (p. 65).

      Although Wechsler (1958) agreed with the criticism that factual information tests depended heavily on educational and cultural opportunities, he felt that the problem need not necessarily be a fatal or even a serious one (p. 65). Similarly, he recognized that certain items would vary in difficulty in different locales or when administered to people of different nationalities: Thus, ‘What is the capital of Italy?’ is passed almost universally by persons of Italian origin irrespective of their intellectual ability (p. 66). Yet he was extremely fond of information, considering it one of the most satisfactory in the battery (p. 67).

      Comprehension (Verbal Comprehension Index)

      Measures of general comprehension were plentiful in tests used before the W-B I, appearing in the original Binet scale and its revisions and in such group examinations as the Army Alpha and the National Intelligence Test. However, the test in multiple-choice format, though still valuable, does not approach the contribution of the task when individuals have to compose their own responses:

      [O]ne of the most gratifying things about the general comprehension test, when given orally, is the rich clinical data which it furnishes about the subject. It is frequently of value in diagnosing psychopathic personalities, sometimes suggests the presence of schizophrenic trends (as revealed by perverse and bizarre responses) and almost always tells us something about the subject's social and cultural background. (Wechsler, 1958, p. 67)

      In selecting questions for the W-B I Comprehension subtest, Wechsler (1958) borrowed some material from the Army Alpha and the Army Memoirs (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1920) and included a few questions that were also on the old Stanford-Binet, probably because they were borrowed from the same source (p. 68). He was not bothered by overlap because of what he perceived to be a very small practice effect for Comprehension: It is curious how frequently subjects persist in their original responses, even after other replies are suggested to them (p. 68).

      The WAIS Comprehension subtest was modified from its predecessor by adding two very easy items to prevent a pile-up of zero scores and by adding three proverb items because of their reported effectiveness in eliciting paralogical and concretistic thinking (Wechsler, 1958, p. 68). Wechsler found that the proverbs did not contribute to the subtest exactly what he had hoped; they were useful for mentally disturbed individuals,

      but poor answers were also common in normal subjects...[and] even superior subjects found the proverbs difficult. A possible reason for this is that proverbs generally express ideas so concisely that any attempt to explain them further is more likely to subtract than add to their clarity. (p. 68)

      Despite the shortcomings of proverbs items, particularly the fact that they seem to measure skills that differ from prototypical general comprehension items (Kaufman, 1985), Wechsler (1981) retained the three proverbs items in the WAIS-R Comprehension subtest. Because these three items are relatively difficult (they are among the last five in the sequence), they are instrumental in distinguishing among the most superior adults regarding the abilities measured by WAIS-R Comprehension. Only two of the proverb items were retained on the WAIS-III, but the WAIS-IV includes four such items.

      According to Wechsler (1958), Comprehension was termed a test of common sense on the Army Alpha, and successful performance

      seemingly depends on the possession of a certain amount of practical information and a general ability to evaluate past experience. The questions included are of a sort that average adults may have had occasion to answer for themselves at some time, or heard discussed in one form or another. They are for the most part stereotypes with a broad common base. (pp. 68–69)

      Wechsler was also careful to include no questions with unusual words so that individuals of even limited education generally have little difficulty in understanding their content (p. 69). Comprehension scores are, however, dependent on the ability to express one's thoughts verbally.

      Digit Span (Working Memory Index)

      Memory Span for Digits (renamed Digit Span) combines in a single subtest two skills that subsequent research has shown to be distinct in many ways (Costa, 1975; Jensen & Figueroa, 1975): repetition of digits in the same order as they are spoken by the examiner and repetition of digits in the reverse order. Wechsler (1958) combined these two tasks for pragmatic reasons, but not theoretical ones: Each task alone had too limited a range of possible raw scores, and treating each set of items as a separate subtest would have given short-term memory too much weight in determining a person's IQ—1/6 instead of 1/11.

      Wechsler was especially concerned about overweighing memory because Digit Span proved to be a relatively weak measure of general intelligence (g). He gave serious consideration to dropping the task altogether but decided to retain it for two reasons:

      1. Digit Span is particularly useful at the lower ranges of intelligence; adults who cannot recall five digits forward and three backward are mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed in 9 cases out of 10 (Wechsler, 1958, p. 71), except in cases of neurological impairment.

      2. Poor performance on Digit Span is of unusual diagnostic significance, according to Wechsler, particularly for suspected brain dysfunction or concern about mental deterioration across the life span.

      Digit Span also has several other advantages that may account for Wechsler's (1958) assertion that perhaps no test has been so widely used in scales of intelligence as that of Memory Span for Digits (p. 70): It is simple to administer and score, it measures a rather specific ability, and it is clinically valuable because of its unusual susceptibility to anxiety, inattention, distractibility, and lack of concentration. Wechsler noted that repetition of digits backward is especially impaired in individuals who have difficulty sustaining concentrated effort during problem solving. The test has been popularly used for a long time by psychiatrists as a test of retentiveness and by psychologists in all sorts of psychological studies (p. 70); because Wechsler retained Digit Span as a regularly administered subtest on the WAIS-R but treated it as supplementary on the WISC-R, it is evident that he saw its measurement as a more vital aspect of adult assessment than of child assessment.

      The WAIS-IV provided an important innovation by adding a third section to the subtest—Digit Span Sequencing. For that section, examinees need to recall the numbers in ascending order, which (like Digits Backward) provides an excellent measure of working memory. This change increases the role of mental manipulation and results in greater demands on working memory, relative to previous versions of Digit Span (Drozdick, Wahlstrom, Zhu, & Weiss, 2012, p. 198).

      Arithmetic (Working Memory Index)

      Wechsler (1958) included a test of arithmetical reasoning in an adult intelligence battery because such tests correlate highly with general intelligence; are easily created and standardized; are deemed by most adults as worthy of a grownup; have been used as a rough and ready measure of intelligence before the advent of psychometrics; and have long been recognized as a sign of mental alertness (p. 69). Such tests are flawed by the impact on test scores of attention span, temporary emotional reactions, and of educational and occupational attainment. As Wechsler notes: "Clerks, engineers and businessmen usually do well on arithmetic tests, while

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