Monday, November 9, 2009

An old reliable gets a norms update

If you have spent any part of your career doing psychoeducaitonal assessments you have probably spent at least some of that time administering, scoring, and interpreting the Beery-Buktenica Development Test of Visual-Motor Integration (Beery VMI).

Despite being quite popular, the test provided significant limitations when used in multi-age environments due to its 18 year old upper limit normative data. Fortunately the test authors have now released an updated normative sample that brings the test up to 100 years of age. That should certainly handle your psychoeducational needs.

I have not yet seen this update (it is in the mail!) so I can not comment on the effectiveness of the norms or if there are test ceiling limitations, but it would certainly seem to fill the VMI gap for those clients that may be unable to complete other integration measures due to additional factors (e.g. executive loads on a Rey complex figure).

The Beery VMI update is available in Canada through Pearson (formally PsychCorp). Pricing was not available to me at the time of writing, but you can certainly purchase either a manual or an updated kit by calling the publisher directly.