Intellectual development of youths as measured by a short form of the wechsler intelligence scale, United States

This report presents information on aspects of the intellectual development of youths 12 through 17 years of age in the noninstitutional population of the United States, as measured by two subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) used in the Health Examination Survey of 1966-70. The two WISC subtests used, for reasons explained below, were the Vocabulary and Block Design subtests. Two reports describing WISC test results of a previous Health Examination Survey of children 6 through 11 years of age have been published. In this report on WISC findings from the survey of youths, analysis is limited to variations in test scores associated with age, sex, and grade placement. Construction of normalized scaled scores and of a short-form estimate of WISC Full Scale Scores for use in the analysis of other data collected in the survey is also described. Subsequent reports will explore the relationships between WISC scores and the behavioral, biomedical, socioeconomic, and other psychometric data gathered in the survey.