DAB-I: Diagnostic Achievement Battery – Intermediate

Description

The DAB-I is an upward extension of the DAB-4, a popular assessment of achievement in elementary and middle school children.

The DAB-I has 8 subtests:

• Word Relationships
• Grammatic Sentences
• Word Identification
• Reading Comprehension
• Spelling*
• Punctuation/Capitalisation*
• Math Calculation*
• Math Reasoning

*can be administered individually or in small groups

These subtests combine to form five academic achievement composite scores for

• spoken language
• reading
• writing
• mathematics, and
• basic academic skills.

The main uses of the DAB-I are:

1. to identify those students who are significantly below their peers in the basic academic skills that relate to success in content area subjects,
2. to determine the particular kinds of component strengths and weaknesses that individual students possess,
3. to document students’ progress in specific areas as a consequence of special intervention programs, and
4. to serve as a measure in research studies of the academic achievement of teenage students.

The DAB-I normative sample was 766 representative students from 18 states. It yields standard scores (M = 10, SD = 3, for the subtests, and M = 100, SD = 15 for the composites), percentile ranks, and age/grade equivalents. Strong evidence is provided for internal consistency, time, and interscorer reliability and for content-description, criterion-prediction, and construct identification validity. Especially encouraging are the new studies of the test’s sensitivity, specificity, false positive ratio, and ROC/AUC and of gender and ethnic bias.