38 Cognitive Skills and School Performance in Sexually Abused Girls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Behavioral and adaptive difficulties are frequent in sexually abused (SA) children and may impact their ability to cope in a school environment. The aim of this study was to evaluate school performance and to analyse predictive factors of adjustment in the school environment of SA girls. Sixty-seven dyads of mothers and SA girls seen at the Child Protection Clinic of CHU Mère-Enfant Ste-Justine for alleged sexual abuse participated in the study. They were matched to non-abused girls recruited in schools in the Montreal area. Sexual abuse data were abstracted from the medical chart according to the History of Victimization Form. Children answered the Children Inventory of Traumatic Event Scale, the Self-Report Coping Scale and the Perceived Social Support Scale. School adaptation variables were evaluated with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) answered by mothers and teachers. Another group of 50 SA girls were compared to a normative sample of 1630 French Canadian children, using the Test d'Aptitude Informatisé (TAI), a standardized measure which evaluates cognitive abilities. Comparisons were done using chi-square test and Student's t test. Predictive factors were analysed with stepwise regression. Mean age of children was 9±1.5 years. SA girls came more often from single parent families (53% vs 32%, P<.01), mothers were younger (34.2 years vs 37.7 years, P<.001), less educated (10.8 years vs 13.1 years, P<.0001), and socio-economic level was lower (36.2 vs 49.7, P<.0001). Sexual abuse was intrafamilial in 51% of cases, and classified as severe in 68% of cases and chronic in 40% of cases. Mothers of the SA group gave lower CBCL scores for school performance (38.34 vs 44.59, P<.0001) and social competence (41.22 vs 47.62, P<.0001), and higher scores for attention problems (65.82 vs 57.48, P<.0001). Teachers' scores for SA girls were lower for school achievement (44.38 vs 52.75, P>.0001), social adaptation with peers (33.46 vs 48.98, P<.0001), and adequate classroom behavior (39.49 vs 43.80, P<.01). School performance was predicted by perceived parental support. Maternal level of education, lower severity of the abuse, and approach coping strategies predicted adequate classroom behavior. In the TAI, SA girls scored at the 26th percentile for vocabulary, 28th for general knowledge, and 35th for arithmetics. This study suggests that SA children are at risk for adaptation difficulties in their school environment. Support interventions should target both the school and the family.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".