Development Of The Memory Assessment Battery For Children And Its Norm

Objects:To rectify and improve the content and the structure of Memory Assessment Battery for Children(MABC) in 2002 by expanding the sampling. The main objectives are as follows:①the construction of scales;②the analysis of reliability and validity;③establishment of locally normal performance in children in Hunan province.Methods:Memory Assessment Battery for Children contained 13 subtests including auditory and visual immediate memory, auditory and visual delayed memory, working memory and other aspects.Test results consisted of sub-scale scores and basic memory index,which called auditory immediate memory, visual immediate memory, auditory delayed memory and visual delayed memory, working memory, immediate memory, delayed memory, auditory memory and visual memory index. The 266 samples are Changsha pupils,136 boys (51.1%) and 130 girls (48.9%).The age of subjects ranged from 6 to 13 years, mainly among the eights to twelves, and the average was 9.58±1.73 years.The retest coefficient, half related coefficient, and Cronbach a reliability coefficient were used to analyse the reliablity. And validity included construct validity and criterion validity.Results:(1)Item analysis showed that children Memory Battery and the difficulty of each subtest index 0.35-0.80, average 0.54, test identification of the sub-index 0.27-0.59.(2)The retest correlation coefficients of sub-tests were statistically significant with 0.38-0.85.And the half correlation coefficients were among 0.78-0.93 in adition to three sub-testes.All Cronbach a coefficients of the sub-tests were 0.79-0.92.(3)Exploratory factor analysis extracted five factors eigenvalue greater than 1 named as logical memory factor,free recall factor, associative memory factor, recognition factor, and working memory factor. Five factors cumulatively explained the variation of 75%;and the inner correlation coefficients were 0.16-0.96,and the correlation coefficients among the MABC and basic memory index were 0.43 -0.97.(4)MABC had a higher correlation with the Associate Learning of WMS-RC by 0.02-0.76,but the rests of WMS-RC were low or moderate;and MABC had non significant relation with Test of Nonverbal Intelligence.(5) The differences among schools were significant in all sub-tests,and parents' professional and cultural background effected their children's performance.Interestingly, mother's impact was greater than father's.There was no sex difference but significant differences in age and grade.Further multiple comparison analysis showed that 6-7s group,8-9s group and 10-13s group were significantly different,and the same as grade one,grade 2-3 and grade 4-6 y. The group of 11 years old usually had the best performance.In this study, we chose the norm-T as MABC's norm in grade and age.Conclusion:This study completed the establishment of MABC and reliability and validity in Hunan Provinice;children's memory was related to the teaching and learning conditions in schools,parental education and profession.The grade and agwas not significant.