Is cross battery assessment essential, or is it too time consuming?

Flanagan and McGrew (1997, p. 322) purport that the cross battery assessment (XBA) approach provides “a much needed and updated bridge between current intellectual theory and research and practice.” The results of confirmatory factor analyses conducted over the past 10 years suggest that no intelligence battery sufficiently measures the full range of broad abilities and processes which define the constructs of intelligence laid out in contemporary psychometric theory.

Many batteries were found to fail to measure three or more broad cognitive abilities, specifically: Ga or auditory processing, Glr or long term storage and retrieval, Gs or cognitive processing speed, and Gf or fluid intelligence and reasoning. These findings motivated Flanagan and her colleagues to develop the cross battery approach to fill in the gaps in assessment.
The steps to XBA are outlined in the book Essentials of Cross-Battery Assessment (Flanagan, Ortiz, & Alfonso, 2007). It also includes software for XBA interpretation. The steps in XBA are: select a primary intelligence battery, identify the CHC abilities that are adequately represented, select tests not to measure CHC abilities not measured by the primary battery, administer primary battery and supplemental tests, enter data into the XBA Data Management and Interpretive Assistant, and then follow guidelines for interpretation.

Can you see this being useful in your practice? Or do you feel it is too time consuming or unnecessary?

Posted by Roxane Nassirpour.