Date of Award

5-1-2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Specialist in Education (Ed.S.)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Lisa Kelly-Vance

Abstract

Practitioners who serve all children are required to administer an accurate comprehensive evaluation of skills in a variety of domains, provide functional information that is easily translated into interventions, and use data to monitor progress. Because of the language and task demands of most standardized cognitive tests, an inappropriate measure of a child's ability may result. Therefore, the need for a linguistically non-biased cognitive measures for early childhood children is necessary. One particular assessment that is proposed is the Play Assessment of Cognitive Skills Scale (PACSS), a functional assessment technique used to determine a child's current level of cognitive functioning through play observation. Although PACSS controls for the problems that are apparent with most standardized measures, no empirical research exists which compares the performance between English and Spanish speaking children. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the differences in performance of both Spanish and English speaking children using both a standardized measure and the PACSS. A significant difference in performance for both groups was not found between the standardized measure and the PACSS. Statistical analysis did not reveal any significant differences between the two groups' performance on the PACSS or standardized test.

Comments

An Ed.S. Field Project Presented to the Department of Psychology and the Faculty of the Graduate College University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Specialist in Education University of Nebraska at Omaha. Copyright Katrina M. Gill-Glover May, 2001

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