A Short Short Form of the WISC and WAIS for Screening Purposes

The primary consideration in deciding whether to use a short form in place of the Full Scale WISC or WAIS is the specific purpose to which the results will be put. For a comprehensive assessment of intellectual functioning, no one would seriously advocate the use of a short form, but to obtain an IQ for screening purposes, there are combinations of three or even two subtesrs that may suffice, as Wechsler (1958) himself has observed. The purpose of the present note is to consider one such short form, Vocabulary and Block Des~gn (V-BD). This particular combination was selected for several reasons, notably the high correlations of these two subtesrs with the Full Scale over a wide age range and their consistenrly high reliabilities. The correlation between the sum of scaled scores on V-BD and the Full Scale score was determined for three age groups in both the WISC and WAIS standardization samples, and four age groups from the WAIS standardization for older persons. All the necessary data were available from the published tables of subtest intercorrelations (Wechsler, 1949; Wechsler, 1955; Doppelt & Wallace, 1955). The regressions were tested and found homogeneous for both tests, and so the pooled