The Scales of Cognitive Ability for Traumatic Brain Injury (SCATBI) assesses cognitive and linguistic abilities of adolescent and adult patients with head injuries. Its results can be used to establish the severity of the injury and can be charted to show progress during recovery. The SCATBI can be individually administered in 30 minutes to 2 hours. It consists of five subtests: Perception/Discrimination, Orientation, Organization, Recall, and Reasoning. Because the subtests use the same standard score scale, direct comparison of performance on the different subtests is possible. Unlike other tests for this population, the SCATBI progresses in difficulty to levels that even some noninjured adults do not typically master. This permits patients who functioned at very high levels prior to injury to be measured with the same instrument as they regain the use of higher level abilities (such as complex organization and abstract reasoning).
The SCATBI is time efficient — administer only those scales you think are useful for evaluating a particular patient. The SCATBI was standardized on a sample of head-injured patients and a sample of matched adults with no history of head injury. Internal consistency coefficients were high (.90 or higher) for all subtests. Test-retest coefficients from a patient sample ranged from a low of .73 (Reasoning) to a high of .89 (Recall). Concurrent validity was supported by correlations between SCATBI scores and levels of the Rancho Los Amigos Scales. Discriminant analysis showed that the five SCATBI scales accurately classified 79.2% of head-injured participants and 95.7% of noninjured participants.
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