Healthy Children Get Low Scores Too: Prevalence of Low Scores on the NEPSY-II in Preschoolers, Children, and Adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowing the prevalence of low test scores in healthy people is valuable for clinical interpretation of neuropsychological performance because it reduces the likelihood of over-diagnosing cognitive deficits. Base-rate information on adult batteries has flourished recently but is relatively unknown for pediatric tests. The purpose of this paper is to present the base rates of low scores for a pediatric neuropsychological battery, the NEPSY-II. Participants included 1,200 healthy preschoolers, children, and adolescents between 3 and 16 years of age from the NEPSY-II standardization sample. Measures included subtests from the attention and executive functioning, language, learning and memory, and visuospatial processing domains, organized to yield a 1- and 2-hr battery with optimal reliability. Analyses were conducted for three age groups (3-4, 5-6, and 7-16 years) and stratified by the level of parental education (<or=11, 12, 13-15, and 16+ years). In 3-4-year-olds, it was uncommon to have three or more scores <or=10th percentile. For 5-6-year-olds, having three or more low scores on the 1- or 2-hr battery was uncommon. In 7-16-year-olds, it was uncommon to have four or more low scores on a 1-hr battery and uncommon to have five or more low scores on a 2-hr battery. With all age groups, the prevalence of low scores decreased substantially with higher levels of parental education. Consistent with the literature on base rates of low scores in adult batteries, having some low scores is common in healthy children. Look-up tables are provided to help in the clinical interpretation of low scores with preschoolers, children, and adolescents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".