Our NIH Toolbox Assessments
One of the immediate values C8Kids can bring to educators is an early assessment of a student’s special needs and abilities. Conventional assessment processes are time-consuming and very expensive, and so they are reserved for children who demonstrate clear signs of cognitive or emotional issues. Most kids just start school and sink or swim in the conventional curriculum until a problem is noticed. By then they have already fallen behind.
Think how valuable it would be to have a simple and immediate assessment. Think how many kids could be put on a success trajectory at the beginning of their elementary schooling. Think how many kids could be saved from IEPs and special needs programs.
Assessing cognitive growth requires the highest quality, scientifically designed tools. In order to combat the lack of uniformity and questionable validity of assessment tools available to educators, parents, and clinicians, the National Institutes of Health has developed a "Toolbox" of cognitive assessments. You can read more about the NIH Toolbox on the NIH website. Upon a careful review of the assessments available from the NIH Toolbox, the C8 Sciences Scientific Advisory Board has recommended a battery of four core assessments that are especially appropriate for measuring the executive functioning skills of young children.
C8Kids starts on Day 1 with this screening, and better yet our program also goes right to work helping the student improve those areas of weakness.
How Do the Toolbox Tests Work?
C8 Sciences incorporates four key assessments from the NIH Toolbox for cognition. These tests are fun and can be taken all at once in less than an hour.
The Flanker Task was developed more than 15 years ago as an assessment of inhibitory control and attention. Students see five arrows in a row, all of which are pointing either to the left or right. Using the arrow keys on their keyboard, the students need to identify which way the arrow in the middle is pointing. In order to do this they need to mentally block out the arrows on either side of (flanking) the one in the middle.
The Working Memory Test: Working Memory is the "scratch pad of the mind" - the ability of the brain to keep and hold information needed to perform any given task - standing in a line, working at a math problem, or quietly sharpening a pencil. The Working Memory Test measures the strength of each student's "scratch pad" by asking them to repeat sequences of pictures shown on their screen in a different order than shown.
The Go/No-Go Test is a simple and fun test of speed of information processing, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. Students are instructed to tap the space bar as soon as they see the letter P - but to refrain from tapping when they see the letter R. Once they've completed a series of trials with "P" as the target, then they must switch and tap when they see R - but not P.
The Dimensional Change Card Sort is a measure of cognitive flexibility. Two target pictures are presented that vary along two dimensions (e.g., shape and color). Students are asked to match a series of test pictures (e.g., yellow balls and blue trucks) to the target pictures, first according to one dimension (e.g., color) and then, after a number of trials, according to the other dimension (e.g., shape). The relevant dimension for sorting is indicated by a cue word (e.g., "shape" or "color") that appears on the screen and by spoken word.
What does research indicate about NIH test data?
Educators today are awash in data. Content assessments tell us something about what students may already know - but it's only cognitive assessments focused on executive skills that tell us what they are capable of learning in the future - and what we can do to help. A very recent study of the NIH Toolbox assessments concluded the following:
"...this study's most impressive evidence of the [NIH Toolbox's] validity...was their strong associations with...children's school performance and needs for special classes or tutoring... Although the Toolbox...does not directly reflect what the child has learned in the past, it does indicate the status of other cognitive abilities that may be considered necessary to succeed in future schoolwork (i.e., attention, working memory, processing speed, episodic memory, and executive function). These findings suggest, therefore, that the [Toolbox assessment] scores may have validity for assessing aspects of children's cognition that are important for educational success."*
Every student who uses C8Kids takes these assessments at the beginning and end of their cognitive cross training course. This allows us to report:
- Measurable cognitive growth for all students enrolled in the program.
- Return on investment: you can hold C8Kids accountable with hard data from these independently-developed assessments.
- Cognitive scores across a variety of dimensions for each individual student relative to their peers.
Can I try the NIH tests for free?
Yes! Sign up for a free, no-obligation two week trial of C8Kids, and the first thing your students will do is complete the NIH Toolbox assessments. Then, you'll get a full review of your results with a C8 cognition development specialist, and receive a complete packet of results on NIH assessments and student cognitive skills.
C8 Sciences is not affiliated in any way with the National Institutes of Health. No official endorsement of C8 Sciences by the National Institutes of Health is implied.
*Zelazo, P. D., et. al. NIH Toolbox Cognitive Function Battery (CFB): Measuring executive function and attention. In P. D. Zelazo & P. J. Bauer (Eds)., National Institutes of Health Toolbox-Cognitive Function Battery (NIH Toolbox CFB): Validation for children between 3 and 15 years. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 2011.
