| Abstract: | Since its introduction five years ago (1974), 113 articles or papers have appeared regarding the WISC-R, including empirical investigations of its nature, as well as its comparability with a variety of other measures of intelligence and achievement, including the WISC. While not all this research has been carefully done, two general conclusions can be derived from the review. First, although the WISC-R involves modification in administration, design, and presentation of items, as well as a complete restandardization, the literature substantially suggests that it remains very similar in nature to its predecessor, the WISC. Investigations of factor analytic structures, standard errors, reliability coefficients, and subtest intercorrelations support the conclusion that individuals perform on the WISC-R largely the same as they do on the WISC. The second conclusion points out (with few exceptions): consistently lower scores were obtained on the WISC-R than on several other measures, including the WISC, the WAIS, the Slosson Intelligence Test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Stanford Binet, which was revised shortly before the WISC. These lower scores on the WISC-R may be due to a variety of influences, including examiner variance, an artifact of design leading to inflated scores on the WISC, and finally and most obviously, the restandardization of the scale. The amount of literature that has appeared over the five-year period suggests that practitioners and researchers are as interested in learning about the WISC-R as they were about the WISC. Despite this fact and the conclusion that the WISC and WISC-R are substantially similar, the present authors encourage caution in the overgeneralization of findings until additional literature develops. |
