Validiteit van de Executieve Functietaken PeuterPlus!

Abstract

During childhood, a child develops Executive Functions, that make it possible to show goal oriented behaviour. This study examined the validity of a new test battery of tasks that measures Executive Functions in toddlers. The participants of this study were 99 children from 10 different daycare centers in the Netherlands. The daycare centers were selected with the use of a convenience sample. Afterwards the parents were asked to give consent for the participation of their child in the study. The internal structures of the task battery were examined through the use of correlation and regression analyses. Also a factor analysis was conducted. Some of the findings supported a good construct validity and some did not. The findings that confirm a good construct validity are that the older participants scored higher on the tasks than the younger participants and no correlation was found between test scores and sex, as also found in previous research. However not all tasks are significantly related, the tasks that intend to measure the same Executive Functions, are not stronger correlated with each other than with the tasks that intend to measure different Executive Functions and ceiling effects were found. Factor-analysis did not support the expectation that all of the tasks would form one factor, namely Executive Functions. Instead two factors were found. This studyshowed that the construct validity of the new test battery is not as good as it could be.