PhD ceremony Ms. L. Visser: The Bayley-III-NL special needs addition. A suitable developmental assessment instrument for young children with special needs

PhD ceremony: Ms. L. Visser

Dissertation: The Bayley-III-NL special needs addition. A suitable developmental assessment instrument for young children with special needs

Promotor(s): prof. A.J.J.M. Ruijssenaars

Faculty: Behavioural and Social Sciences

Most children develop according to expectations in their first few years of life. In some cases, however, early development is not trouble-free. Appropriate developmental assessment is then important to adjust early intervention to the developmental level of the child.

A widely-used instrument for developmental assessment is the Bayley-III-NL. This instrument appears to be unsuitable in many cases of cognitive and/or physical impairment. The test materials are not adjusted to the abilities of children in this target group and the test results do not yield sufficient information as a basis for the intervention.

This dissertation describes the results of a research project, funded by ZonMw, into the Special Needs Addition (SNA) to the Bayley-III-NL. The aim of the SNA is to solve the described problems related to the Bayley-III-NL. The SNA consists of the Low Motor/Vision version for children with motor and/or visual impairment, the Low Verbal version for children with speech/language impairment, and the dynamic version for obtaining a more intervention-oriented assessment.

The results show that the SNA-version enhances the suitability of the Bayley-III-NL for children with specific impairments and that the dynamic version has substantial added clinical value. On the basis of these results, the Bayley-III-NL-SNA will be published mid-2014. The instrument will thus actually be used in early intervention practice in the Netherlands to assess the development of children with a cognitive and/or physical impairment more validly than was possible up to now.