About the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities
Richard Woodcock at the Iowa Testing Programs and Mary Bonner Johnson developed the original 1977 Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery to provide a unique combination: a cognitive abilities assessment AND an academic achievement assessment, in a single integrated framework with shared norms. This made it particularly valuable for learning disability diagnosis, where comparing cognitive ability to academic achievement is central to the diagnostic process.
The 1977 WJ went through major revisions in 1989 (WJ-R), 2001 (WJ-III), and 2014 (WJ-IV, current). The WJ-IV is explicitly aligned with the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence, with subtests measuring each of the CHC broad abilities: Comprehension-Knowledge (Gc), Fluid Reasoning (Gf), Visual Processing (Gv), Auditory Processing (Ga), Working Memory (Gwm), Long-Term Storage and Retrieval (Glr), Cognitive Processing Speed (Gs), and Quantitative Knowledge (Gq).
Along with the WAIS-IV and the Stanford-Binet 5, the WJ-IV is one of the three dominant individually-administered cognitive assessments used by US clinicians and educational psychologists today. It is particularly favored for learning disability assessment because of its integrated cognitive + achievement design.
The 2 subtests
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
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