A. How were the developmental sequences (or task/ skill sequences) derived?
The authors of the AGS took their personal philosophy which states: “The importance of the early childhood period in the optimal development of children, and strongly believe that effective preschool screening, as one of the first steps in assessing and providing interventions for at-risk families, can ultimately result in prevention of children’s later learning and behavior problems.” (Harrison, 1990) The authors used this philosophy along with their knowledge of developmental and functional skills of children and families, experiences with assessment, recognition of the limitations in existing preschool screening instruments, and the need for improvements in screening practices to create the AGS.
B. Does it measure what it intends to measure? (How do you know?)
The AGS has assessments in each of the four areas Cognitive/Language, Articulation, Motor Skills, Fine Motor Skills and Social Skills. The intentions of this test are vary imbalanced. There is a whole manual and testing system for social skills, yet the other developmental areas are irregular. For example; the gross motor profile only tests on 5 different areas where as the cognitive/language profile tests on 25 different areas. The articulation profile has 20 different test questions and the fine motor has 3 questions. This is a rather extreme difference and causes an offset of what the assessment is really looking for. The social skills profile then has parent/teacher questionnaires and is very unclear on how the assessor is to go about using this portion of the test.
C. Does it have the ability to make the discriminations you want as an interventionist? Why?
The scoring on this test does not have room for discriminations, but the scoring is different for each test and is rather confusing. When assessing the child it is either pass or fail and does not state clearly in the directions if there is...