Kaufman-ABC Intelligence Test

The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC)

The KABC-II is a conceptual and structural revision of the K-ABC that took 5 years to complete. It evolved out of the pioneering work of Alan Kaufman who served as the project manager for the revised version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in 1974 by the Psychological Corporation, where he worked directly with David Wechsler. In 1979, Kaufman authored Intelligent Testing With the WISC-R, in which he introduced the concept of intelligent testing and suggested that examiners apply theoretical knowledge and clinical judgment flexibly in order to provide meaning to the scores obtained from intelligence tests. In 1983, he coauthored the K-ABC with his wife Nadine while working as a professor at the University of Georgia. Interestingly, the K-ABC development team also included several of his doctoral students, some of whom went on to publish psychoeducational tests on their own.

The K-ABC was a revolutionary instrument at the time of its publication and was praised for its rigorous standardization procedures and sophisticated validity studies. Psychometric researchers often credit its technical validation with setting the standard for future tests. The K-ABC was also heavily influenced by the neuropsychological theories of A. R. Luria and Roger Sperry during its conceptualization and was the first test to integrate cognitive psychology into intelligence testing. In contrast to the popular Wechsler Scales, which primarily emphasized the measurement of [Page 920]general intelligence (g), the K-ABC test structure emphasized multiple cognitive components, including sequential and simultaneous processing. Because of the de-emphasis of g and the exclusive focus on elements of cognitive processing, it was suggested that the K-ABC was a more useful instrument for appraising the cognitive abilities of culturally and linguistically diverse individuals who were thought to be the subject of bias in traditional IQ tests. To support this notion, validity studies in the K-ABC technical manual provided evidence that the difference in scores between Black and White examinees was less than that often reported in more conventional measures such as the Wechsler Scales. Additionally, the K-ABC provided users with a global achievement scale, making it the first cognitive test developed to be a comprehensive psychoeducational measure. Accordingly, it became a popular instrument in learning disability evaluations conducted by school and educational psychologists as well as for clinicians seeking an alternative to the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales.

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