Test of Everyday Attention for Children

TEA-Ch2 is now available

The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) builds on the TEA by measuring attentive abilities in children.

Benefits

• Standardised scores allow comparison of attentional performance in each of the attentional domains
• TEA-Ch is suitable for group or single case assessment of children with a wide range of abilities

Features

• The TEA-Ch comprises 9 subtests which measure children’s abilities to:
  • selectively attend;
  • sustain their attention;
  • divide their attention between two tasks;
  • switch attention from one thing to another;
  • withhold (inhibit) verbal and motor responses.
• Suitable for children aged 6–16 years.
• Subtests are sensitive to the developmental progression of attentional skills
• Two parallel forms which allow for confidence in re-testing of the same child

If the child circles all the pairs of spaceships (correct as well as incorrect) does he still get the credit for identifying 20 pairs of correct spaceships?

If this happens during the practice, you should ask the child to only circle the targets. If this behaviour begins during the test stop the test and say "That was a clever idea - but I only want you to circle the targets" and begin the test again (perhaps using version B). Your aim is always to make a fair comparison with the control group.

Can you tell me more about the test-retest reliability data on the TEA-Ch?

Test-retest reliabilities for the subtests on the TEA-Ch are presented below. For measures with a good range these are test-retest correlations with age partialled out (if age is not removed, spuriously high correlations are achieved). Where ceiling effects make correlations unrealistic, the percentage agreement within 1 standard deviation (3 age scaled points) for 1st and 2nd test is given.

Table 1: Test-retest correlation coefficients (age partialled out) and percentage agreements for measures with ceiling effects for 55 children

Measure

Correlation coefficient

Sky Search time per target

0.80

Sky Search attention score

0.75

Score!

76.2%

Creature counting accuracy

0.71

Creature counting timing score

0.57

Sky search DT decrement

0.81

Map Mission

0.65

Score DT

71.4%

Walk, Don't Walk

71.0%

Same world time

0.87

Opposite World time

0.85

Code transmission

0.78

We are looking for clarification on administering the Score subtest of the TEA-Ch. The directions allow for correction when children begin using their fingers to count the Score sounds, however, it is unclear as to whether they are allowed to count aloud. The feedback a child is given is that we want to see how well they can complete the task in their head, but the directions do not explicitly state that they cannot count aloud, while there are explicit corrections for using their fingers. How was this addressed in standardisation?

Response from author Tom Manly:

“This was a particularly tricky issue in the practicalities of administering the task. Firstly we did not want to encourage children in this strategy by mentioning it before the task was begun. If children were counting aloud, as you say, they are given the instruction about being most interested in their ability to count in their head. However, we found that some children, typically the youngest, could not inhibit audible verbal counting which, presumably, reflects sub-vocal counting in other children - which cannot be easily detected. Rather than invite researchers and clinicians to throw out masses of useful data we therefore felt that the audible/sub-vocal counting distinction was not sufficiently great to throw out these scores.”