Consistency of Cognitive and Motor Performance Measures over Two Years in Reading Retarded Children

Abstract

Children identified for specific reading retardation were tested at initial contact and after 2 yr. on a variety of measures including seat activity, and cognitive and motor steadiness tasks. Developmentally there were few improvements on the accuracy and response time measures, whereas response speed and motor steadiness improved substantially with maturation. Consistency of performance over the 2 yr. showed the following pattern. Correlations for accuracy and response time were generally around chance levels, whereas the predictive validity for seat movement was in the low to moderate range. Speed of response and motor steadiness showed moderate to very high consistency over the 2 yr. Reliability estimates at each test interval were generally high for all variables except accuracy. These results suggest that there may be an advantage in adopting speed measures in preference to response time, and they also highlight the importance of the temporal dimension in cognitive testing.