About the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC)
By the early 1980s, the WISC-R (1974) was the dominant child individual cognitive assessment but had attracted increasing criticism for showing substantial mean score differences between racial and ethnic groups, raising questions about cultural fairness. Alan Kaufman (Yale) and Nadeen Kaufman set out to build an alternative grounded in Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria's theory of neuropsychological functioning, which emphasized brain-based processing distinctions over verbal/performance content distinctions.
The K-ABC organized cognitive assessment into Sequential Processing (analyzing information serially over time - hand movements, number recall, word order) and Simultaneous Processing (analyzing information all at once - face recognition, gestalt closure, matrix analogies, spatial memory). These constructs are grounded in Luria's distinction between successive and simultaneous cognitive processing. The K-ABC also included a separate Achievement scale to allow ability-achievement comparison.
The 1983 K-ABC achieved its goal of substantially smaller racial and ethnic score gaps than the WISC. It also offered Wechsler-equivalent overall reliability and validity, making it a credible alternative for clinical and educational use. The 2004 K-ABC-II is the current edition; it remains widely used particularly for children from culturally diverse backgrounds and for bilingual assessment.
The 3 subtests
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
K-ABC items remain under Pearson copyright. We document the battery's history and significance.
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