The Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test with Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to test two hypotheses proposed by Bracken and McCallum (1998), authors of the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT), as to how children diagnosed with ADHD would perform on the UNIT. Twenty-nine students between the ages of 5 and 17 years were administered the extended battery of the UNIT twice, with an average of 31 days between testing sessions. Paired sample t tests evaluated mean scores on various sections of the UNIT, and test-retest stability coefficients were compared with those reported in the test manual. As one hypothesis predicted, the students' scores were significantly lower on the Memory Quotient than on the Reasoning Quotient. However, an alternative hypothesis predicting lower scores on successive-processing and planning tasks than on simultaneous tasks was not supported. Additional findings were reported on the stability of the UNIT with students with ADHD.