Advantages & disadvantages of informal assessment... The disadvantages of pecs What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages... The Advantages of Narrative Observations Psychoanalytic theory & children's classroom... Kaufman's Five Levels of Evaluation Problem-Solving Skills for Police The Advantages of Exploratory Research Design Free IQ Tests With Results for Kids Advantages & disadvantages of reciprocal... Advantages and disadvantages of special schools What are the advantages and disadvantages... How Can I Reset the PCM on My Car? How to Write a Health Assessment Report How to Implement Piaget's Theory in the Classroom Advantages & disadvantages of using observations... Barriers to Communication in Children
Child assessments evaluate development and progress by gathering objective information. Checklists provide a tool for recording a child's behavior to assess potential problems or to develop a behavior management plan. Understanding the benefits and limitations of a child behavior checklist helps you determine if the evaluation tool is appropriate for your needs.
Checklists offer a simple evaluation method that you can use repeatedly. When you make your own behavior checklist, you can customize the list to meet your specific objectives for the evaluation. You can adapt the original checklist as your evaluation needs change. This type of assessment is usually quick to complete since you only need to check whether or not the child exhibits the behavior.
Pro: Specific Traits
A checklist allows you to evaluate specific traits in a child's behavior. Instead of general observation, you can drill down to capture exactly what the child is doing and focus on those particular behaviors or traits for a targeted assessment. The detailed traits give the checklist evaluation a particular direction, allowing you to focus on one or more narrow aspects of behavior. Because the checklist spells out exactly what you're looking for, many different people can administer the evaluation with similar results.
While the specific behaviors listed on the checklist give the evaluation focus, they can also limit the assessment scope, giving an incomplete picture of the child's behavior. A checklist leaves no gray area for kids who might exhibit a particular behavior only in certain situations or only partially demonstrate each trait. The checklist doesn't take into consideration things like the amount of time it takes to exhibit the behavior, events leading up to a particular behavior or environmental factors that could affect how the child acts.
While specific in the traits a checklist evaluates, this assessment method doesn't provide supporting evidence and details about the specific trait. In a checklist, you simply check whether or not the child exhibits each behavior on the list. The evaluation generally does not include specific descriptions of behaviors or anecdotal records of specific incidents. If another adult reviews the completed checklist, he gets an idea of what the child can do, but he won't get a sense of what causes those behaviors or actions.
Child behavior checklists are available for use in the diagnosis of conditions from autism to epilepsy. While they are not sufficient on their own, they play a potentially vital role in detecting hidden conditions that might otherwise go unnoticed. A checklist allows parents or teachers to quickly report behaviors, while health care providers are able to tell at a glance whether particularly worrisome traits are present. Yet checklists are prone to the influence of bias and do not take into account the individual differences between children.
Pro: Ease of Use
Rather than trying to remember the many behaviors that children exhibit each day and determine which ones are important to report, a checklist allows parents and teachers to simply answer a list of supplied questions. Behavior checklists use rating scales, so filling out the form is as simple as circling the appropriate number beside each question. Scoring the form is equally easy. According to “The Child Behavior Checklist and Related Forms,” hand-scoring takes around 5 minutes, while computer scoring requires less than 2 minutes.
Pro: Early Detection
Many disabilities are hidden, which means that they are often missed. A busy parent, teacher or health care provider might overlook subtle symptoms or dismiss them as signs of immaturity. The black and white, clear-cut nature of a checklist brings potential symptoms to the forefront. If a particular cluster emerges, the health care provider knows to follow up with further diagnostic instruments.
Although they are heavily tested for validity and reliability, checklists are inherently limited to averages and norms. They cannot cover the individual differences between children. In addition, a key criteria for diagnosing an emotional or behavioral disorder is that it must cause significant difficulties in two or more areas of daily life. Checklists could lead to over-diagnosis of issues that are not necessarily a problem at all.
Con: Reporter Bias
Behavioral checklists require parents and teachers to rate behaviors according to a designated scale. Inherent biases could cause over-reporting or under-reporting of specific behaviors. For example, “The Child Behavior Checklist and Related Forms” shows a sample rating sheet on which the parent must decide whether the description is not true, true some of the time, or always true. One of the listed behaviors is “Cries a Lot.” A parent with a low tolerance for crying might select “always true,” while one with a higher tolerance might choose “sometimes true.”
Photo Credits
- BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images