The British Ability Scales (BAS) have long been established as one of the UK’s leading standardised batteries for assessing a child’s cognitive ability. It is also unique in its use of modern psychometric methods for standardisation and scoring purposes, and was the first test of its type to introduce Rasch scaling to the norming process. We carried out the UK standardization of the BAS-III for GL Assessment in 2009-2011
The BAS-III is individually administered and designed for use by educational and clinical psychologists for the assessment of children referred for learning and/or behavioural difficulties. There are two batteries:
- Early Years BAS-III is for children between the ages of 3 years 0 months and 7 years 11 months,
- School Age BAS-III for children and students aged from 6 years 0 months to 17 years 11 months.
On the basis of to the National Curriculum, and on feedback received from users of the 2nd Edition, several important changes were made.
- A new, easy to use, multiple-choice Recognition of Designs scale
- A revised attainment scales of Number Skills
- A revised Spelling scale
- A new parallel form of Word Reading.
As well as a simplified one-level structure for the Early Years BAS-III, minor changes were made to its Picture Similarities, Naming Vocabulary and Verbal Comprehension scales.
BAS-III is published by GL Assessment.