Contributions of modern measurement theory to measuring executive function in early childhood: An empirical demonstration

This study demonstrates the merits of evaluating a newly developed battery of executive function tasks, designed for use in early childhood, from the perspective of item response theory (IRT). The battery was included in the 48-month assessment of the Family Life Project, a prospective longitudinal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental child psychology Vol. 108; no. 3; pp. 414 - 435
Main Authors Willoughby, Michael T., Wirth, R.J., Blair, Clancy B.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Elsevier Inc 01.03.2011
Elsevier
Elsevier BV
Subjects
African Americans
Attention
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Cognitive ability
Cognitive Processes
Early childhood
Evaluation Methods
Executive Function
Family Life
Female
Humans
Individual Differences
Item Response Theory
Longitudinal Studies
Low Income
Male
Measurement
Memory, Short-Term
Neuropsychological Tests
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Poverty
Preschool
Prospective Studies
Psychometrics
Stroop Test
Task Analysis
Task Performance and Analysis
Theory
Young Children
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Early childhood
Measurement
Preschool
Psychometrics
Executive function
Item response theory
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Summary:This study demonstrates the merits of evaluating a newly developed battery of executive function tasks, designed for use in early childhood, from the perspective of item response theory (IRT). The battery was included in the 48-month assessment of the Family Life Project, a prospective longitudinal study of 1292 children oversampled from low-income and African American families. IRT models were applied to a select set of tasks to demonstrate empirically (a) a principled method for item evaluation, including the utility of item characteristic curves; (b) how to explicitly test whether the measurement properties of executive function tasks are invariant across mutually exclusive subgroups of youths; (c) how the precision of measurement of a given task can vary according to underlying child ability; and (d) the utility of using IRT-based versus percentage correct scores. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of developing psychometrically sound and scalable instruments that facilitate the measurement of interindividual differences in intraindividual change of executive function across the early childhood period.
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ISSN:0022-0965
1096-0457
DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.04.007