國小兒童注意力量表之再測一致性、隨機測量誤差與練習效應

Background and Purpose: The Attention Scale for Elementary School Children (ASESC) includes five subscales, assessing focused, sustained, selective, alternating and divided attention, respectively. The whole scale score was used to indicate children's overall attention performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the test-retest agreement, random measurement error and practice effect of the ASESC to improve its clinical utility. Method: One hundred and four elementary school children were assessed using the ASESC twice, 4 weeks apart. Results: The value of intraclass correlation coefficient for the whole scale was the highest (0.90), and its percentage of minimal detectable change (MDC%) was lower than the criterion (15.7%). The effect size d of the whole scale was also very small (≤ 0.15). The MDC% (26.2%) of the sustained attention subscale was lower than the criterion. However, the MDC% (≥ 33.4%) of the focused, selective, alternating and divided attention subscales were all higher than the criterion. The effect size of the focused, sustained and divided attention scale were larger (≥ 0.20) in second grade children. Conclusion: The ASESC whole scale score had highest test-retest agreement, lowest random measurement error and negligible practice effect, which is most suitable for clinical and research use. If clinicians tend to understand children's specific attentional performance, they should administer the subtests of each subscale 2-3 times to obtain an average score to reduce random measurement error. For second grade children or under, more practice before formal test is helpful to reduce the practice effect.