Originally Posted by 22B
Originally Posted by aeh
Originally Posted by 22B
Originally Posted by aeh
Low PSI and coding scores have many possible causes, some of which have already been listed here, including: inattention, impulsivity (if high error rate), fine-motor deficits, vision, perceptual weaknesses, anxiety, depression, perfectionism, fatigue, sleep disorders, allergies, psychomotor retardation as a medication side effect.

So how it presents in real life depends on what the etiology is.
What about my suggestion. I don't think it's on your list.

Originally Posted by 22B
This topic comes up a lot, and the "perfectionism" explanation is a common one (assuming it's not a legitimate case of slow processing). I'm not convinced. I think the problem is that you have a task where you need to come up with a strategy to find the right balance between speed and accuracy, and you have no reference point to know how fast you should be trying to go (and maybe don't have the life experience to even think about such strategies) so you simply set about the task most likely at a non-optimal speed.

I just don't think it's a good test where the score depends on whether a child happens to hit on the right balance of speed and accuracy.

That makes sense, too. Especially with very young children, who have yet to be trained with math-minutes, group standardized testing, etc. But these tasks persist despite that because the development of that balance probably has a sufficiently consistent trajectory over the NT population, such that it is already accounted for in the age-norms.
I suppose my point is that, on a strategy continuum from slow&accurate to fast&inaccurate, each testee will make an uninformed choice of strategy, and their score will include a "luck" component depending how near of far each testee's chosen strategy happens to be from their optimal strategy. This could add a large amount of noise to the signal that represents their true ability at the task if they had chosen their optimal strategy. It may be possible to quantify this effect on average, but in a population of testees, some may be far more adversely affected than others simply due to their unfortunate non-optimal strategy choice, rather than their true ability.
Agreed, for the individual examinee. But as much as these are instruments used for individual assessment, the norms are group norms.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...