Post by Admin on Mar 18, 2014 21:00:03 GMT -6
Wow, they are starting to advertise the new WISC-V, the U.S. version arriving this fall, whereas the Canadian version will likely be out next spring 2015. It certainly looks better than the WISC-IV. The subtests are purer measures of the five factors they have. Instructions have been shortened and simplified, some subtests have been substituted, others have been eliminated, and some new ones have been added. They also have two versions: a paper & pencil version, and an electronic one using 2 Bluetooth-connected iPads (one for the psychologist & one for the student). See the attachments below for more information:
WISC-VWebinarHandout02062014.pdf (281.09 KB)
I viewed a webinar on the new WISC-V this week. I am pleased with most of the changes. On the other hand, I am disappointed that the Letter-Number Sequencing subtest still gives equal weight to responses that are limited to repeating back the stimuli verbatim versus responses that involve re-ordering the stimuli. Only the latter is true working memory. I believe they could have at least weighted the re-ordering responses with 2-points, while giving only 1 point for verbatim responses. The idea here is to distinguish between students who are better at auditory working memory from those who are only able to handle auditory short-term memory. What are your thoughts on this?
I had a nice reply about my concern from one of the lead researches for the WISC-V. Apparently, they have added better teaching instructions to the WISC-V LNS subtest, like on the WAIS-IV. Moreover, the trial level difficulty for those responses that require reordering and those that do not was not reliably distinguishable in the data. Therefore, different weighting for proper re-ordering (i.e., numbers before letters) vs. improper re-ordering (i.e., letters before numbers) would not help to differentiate those with better working memory from those with lesser working memory. This of course seems counter-intuitive. Perhaps it says something about the limitations of this particular type of task, or the nature of working memory development? Perhaps another type of working memory test is needed?