Description

The PTONI assesses reasoning abilities in young children. Psychologists, diagnosticians, special educators, speech-language pathologists, and other professionals can use this test to identify both severe intellectual deficits and superior cognitive intelligence.The nonverbal format of the PTONI is especially appropriate for testing children who typically are not verbally or motorically well developed.Furthermore, directions in eight alternative languagesare provided for the PTONI making it an appropriate assessment ofintelligence for children from diverse language backgrounds.

The test format requires a child to look at a series of pictures on each page in the Picture Book and point to the one picture that does not belong with the others. Items are arranged in order of difficulty. Early items measure lower order reasoning (e.g., visual and spatial perception). Later items measure higher order reasoning abilities (e.g., analogical thinking, sequential reasoning, and categorical formulation). A childs performance is recorded as a standard score (called the Nonverbal Index), a percentile rank, and an age equivalent.

Administration and Scoring

The PTONI was normed on a culturally and ethnically diverse demographic sample of 1,010 children. Testing takes approximately 5-15 minutes. Minimal oral directions and a pointing-response format make it one of the most easily understood of all nonverbal intelligence tests for young children. Early items measure lower order reasoning (e.g., visual and spatial perception). Later items measure higher order reasoning abilities (e.g., analogical thinking, sequential reasoning, and categorical formulation). Performance is recorded as a standard score (called the Nonverbal Index), percentile rank, and age equivalent.