Administering Design Fluency Tests in School-aged Children: Analyses of Design Productivity over Time, Clustering, and Switching

This study investigated the effects of child-related factors (age, sex, and intellectual abilities) upon design fluency (DF) test scores. A DF test, a semantic verbal fluency (VF) test, and a Block Design test, as a proxy of intelligence, were administered to N = 80 healthy native Dutch-speaking chi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Clinical neuropsychologist 2013-10, Vol.27 (7), p.1131-1149
Main Author: Hurks, Petra P. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Age Factors
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Children
Cluster Analysis
Clustering
Design fluency
Developmental psychology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Intelligence
Intelligence Tests
Linear Models
Male
Netherlands
Neuropsychological Tests
Nonverbal Communication
Productivity
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychomotor Performance
Reaction Time
Sex Factors
Switching
Time Factors
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This study investigated the effects of child-related factors (age, sex, and intellectual abilities) upon design fluency (DF) test scores. A DF test, a semantic verbal fluency (VF) test, and a Block Design test, as a proxy of intelligence, were administered to N = 80 healthy native Dutch-speaking children aged 8.45-12.82 years. Three components of DF performance were examined, i.e., design productivity over time, clustering (i.e., generating designs that share visual-spatial similarities, such as addition, deletion, or rotation), and switching (i.e., shifting between strategies that children use to draw the designs). The relation between DF design productivity over time and age was curvilinear, that is, improvements in test scores were much more pronounced for younger children than for older children. No (curvi)linear age effects were found in DF productivity scores, clustering, and switching. Also, our results did not reveal a relation between intellectual abilities and DF test scores. Furthermore, DF test scores and VF test scores were only partially significant, i.e., only significant positive correlations were found between the productivity scores of the VF test and the DF test. Finally, higher order sex by age interactions were found in all DF test scores, i.e., girls 10.5 years. This illustrates the utility of combining quantitative scoring procedures with in-depth clustering and switching to understand interactions between age and sex during DF tests.
ISSN:1385-4046
1744-4144
DOI:10.1080/13854046.2013.821170