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Woodcock, R. W., McGrew, K. S., & Mather, N. (2001). Woodcock-Johnson III Test. Riverside Publishing Company. Itasca, IL
PURPOSE AND NATURE OF TEST
The Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III) is an individually administered battery of tests that provide a comprehensive measure of abilities and achievement across a wide age range. This battery of tests represents the most recent revision of the original Woodcock-Johnson PsychoEducational Battery (WJ) published in 1977. The WJ III consists of two distinct, co-normed batteries: the WJ III Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJ III COG) and the WJ III Tests of Achievement (WJ III ACH), Forms A and B. This co-norming procedure allows the batteries to function together as a diagnostic system for evaluating domain-specific skills with related cognitive abilities as well as traditional ability/achievement discrepancies. Together, these batteries provide for either comprehensive or focused norm-referenced assessments of general intellectual ability, specific cognitive abilities, oral language, and academic achievement (McGrew & Woodcock, 2001). The WJ III batteries are designed to maintain a range of measurement extending from children as young as age 2 years up through adults over 90 years of age.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
The WJ III COG and WJ III ACH each consists of a standard and an extended battery. Depending on the purpose of the assessment, the WJ III batteries may be used alone in standard or extended format or in combination with tests and clusters from the other battery (McGrew & Woodcock, 2001). The WJ III ACH is available in two forms (Forms A and B) of parallel content, which allows more frequent alternated use of this battery to measure achievement while reducing the effects of familiarity with test items on performance (Mather & Woodcock, 2001a; Webster, 1994).
Each battery contains two easel test books, an examiner's manual and training workbook, a technical manual, a computer scoring program, examinee test records and response booklets, an audio recording, and scoring guides. Examiners must provide a stopwatch, audiocassette tape player with head phones, and pencils. Computerized scoring and profiling have replaced the complicated and tedious hand-scoring process of the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised (WJ-R; Lee & Stefany, 1995; Webster, 1994). Although estimated age- and grade-equivalent scores are still available from the "scoring tables" in the test record, for most tests use of...