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The Role of Performance Validity Testing in Child & Adolescent Diagnostic Assessment | Full Webinar – Transcript
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- Dr. Cecil R. Reynolds discusses the role of performance validity testing in child and adolescent diagnostic assessment.
- Performance validity tests measure whether an individual is giving their best effort on tests of maximum performance.
- The pediatric performance validity test suite consists of five different measures designed for children and youth aged five to 18.
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Hello everyone, my name is Paru and I'mpleased to welcome you to today's MHS webinar entitled the role of performancevalidity testing in child and adolescents diagnostic assessmentpresented by Dr. Cecil R. Reynolds.
This webinar is part of MHS webinarseries unmasking ADHD practical strategies to empower youth and adults.We are thrilled to have you all here with us today and would like to begin bytelling you a bit about MHS clinical and education divisions.MHS clinical specializes in aiding the identification and treatment ofpsychological disorders for improved
patient outcomes at all stages of life.MHS education specializes in providing the expertise and resources required tohelp children and adolesense reach their full potential in and beyond theclassroom.
With our advanced suit of tools, team ofexperts and robust data sets, we help clients provide comprehensiveevaluations and uncover powerful insights.Now without further ado, it's my great pleasure to introduce you to ourpresenter today.
Dr. Reynolds earned his doctoral degreefrom the University of Georgia with a major in school psychology and minors instatistics and clinical neurosychology. He has authored over 300 scholarlypublications and 50 books including the energetic brain and the handbook ofclinical child neurosychology.
Dr. Reynolds has developed over 50 testand holds three US patents. Dr. Reol's maintained a clinicalpractice for 25 years specializing in trauma and traumatic brain injury andserved as chief of neurossychology at Sandstone Psychiatric Hospital beforeretiring in 2003 to focus on forensic
work and writing. He has also served aseditorin chief for several leading journals and currently edits the journalof pediatric neurosychology. He is a diplomat in clinical andpediatric neurosychology and a former president of several professionalboards. Over his career, he has received numerous honors including APA division16 senior scientist awards as well as
the president's gold medal from nationalacademy of neurosychology. We are so glad to have you here with ustoday Dr. Reynolds. As we begin our presentation, I wouldagain like to quickly remind everyone that there will be a survey sent to youin order to satisfy CE credit requirements. If you do not receive thisemail before the end of the session,
please send us an email at marketingmhs.com so we can send it to you. Now let'sstart the webinar. I will hand it over to you Dr. Denols now.>> Thank you Peru. I I appreciate the introduction and welcome everybody.Thank you for being here today. I know your time is quite valuable and Iappreciate your willingness to share
some of it with me today and hopefullyyou will find uh at least some of what I have to say valuable if not who knowseven interesting. So we're going to be talking today about the role ofperformance validity testing in child and adolescent diagnostic assessment.We're going to go through that in some
detail. And one of the things we'll betalking about is an instrument that I've developed with some colleagues. Um, andwhile I'll be doing the training on that, I do want to acknowledge uh BobMcCaffrey, Julie Lynch, and Robert Lurk for their contributions to this as well.And as we talk about that instrument,
which is the pediatric performancevalidity test suite, just know that I receive royalties from its sales. Andwhile I view my comments and opinions as expressed to be accurate, you shouldalways judge the facts and materials for yourself and make an independentdecision about your choice of diagnostic and related techniques and how it fitsinto your practice with your patients
and your examinees.So what we hope to accomplish today is a brief overview of literature onpediatric performance validity assessmentwith an emphasis on the need for evaluating effort in both clinical andschool settings.
Andthis issue of performance validity testing is going to be importantwhenever you use tests of maximum performance.And I'll define those in detail for you in just a few minutes. But that wouldinclude things like intelligence, academic achievement, any kind ofneurosychological testing or
psychoeducational testing.And then as I mentioned, we'll talk specifically aboutuh the most recent and the most comprehensiveperformance validity test available for children and youth.So unless you've kind of been under a rockfor about the last five years, you're
probably familiar with the fact thatthere have been huge scandals related to college admissions cheatingand kids getting psychologists and other people to givethem specific diagnoses that allow them to be in a special admissions track forcollege or to get special accommodations. s for their entranceexams or for other purposes related to
that. And some of that involvescollusion with examiners, but some of it is simply a matter of having kids faketheir performance.
And one of the things that we've seen isthat it was much more widpread than we thought. We all knew that thiskind of thing went on. At least something along these lines. If you wereinvolved in assessing adolescence, you knew that the certain percentage of themwould fake things like ADHD, would fake
specific symptoms like attentionproblems, might fake stress where they couldn't work under speed, might dothings like that that weren't legitimate for them. although they were legitimatefor the majority of kids that we saw who expressed these problems. And the issuefor us is figuring out which one
really do need these accommodations orspecial admissions tracks and which ones don't.And that became a problem. And it became apublic problem as the media began to really flock to this story and reallypublicize it primarily because some
Hollywood celebrities got involved.So once that happened, it really became popular in the media and it's stillaround and in fact some of these celebrities even went to prison.So our solution for that is to move toperformance validity testing. And a
performance validity test is a measurewhether the individual you're testing is giving their optimal performance that istheir best effort on tests traditionally characterized as maximum performancetest.
so that we can relyupon our common interpretations. But these interpretations rely upon theexaminee doing their best. Did they really try?And that's critical to our ability to be able to interpret our tests.Some other lingo around this that you'll
encounter as you read this literatureand that you may hear me use today are terms like effort testing, which I'lltalk about a lot, response bias testing, symptom validity testing, andperformance validity testing. And at one time in the past, all of these termswere used synonymously.
We no longer do that. We differentiateamong some of these. Symptom validity testing, for example, is now used torefer to the veracity of an examinees subjective or self-report complaints ifthey tell us they have certain problems.
And so we use a different form ofassessment to determine if we're getting symptomvalidity. And we call those symptom validity tests. Strangely enough,performance validity, which is also effort testing,refers to the accuracy of the examinees
cognitive scores as an indication oftheir actual cognitive, neurosychological or educational status.And as I said, we refer to this as effort testing because that's the keyissue on maximum performance tests.
Did they do their best?For many years, clinicians, myself included, by the way, believed thatchildren really didn't lie or minger or engage in dissimulation as adults mightdo. or if they did, and we knew a very small number did, it was easy to detect.Oh, we'll we'll know. I have so much
experience with kids. He didn't givingme good effort or is trying to deceive me. I'll know. Turns out the researchsays they were wrong, including me.
We're not as good at this as we think.So, are children capable of deception? Eve? how youngchildren begin deceiving others as early as about age two and a half.And this early lie telling is usually kind of self-s serving. Uh no, I Ididn't eat that cookie even though we