Ages: 5 years to 18 years

Testing Time: 10 minutes

Description:

Assess executive function behaviors in the school and home environments with the BRIEF, a questionnaire developed for parents and teachers of school-age children. Designed to assess the abilities of a broad range of children and adolescents, the BRIEF is useful when working with children who have learning disabilities and attention disorders, traumatic brain injuries, lead exposure, pervasive developmental disorders, depression, and other developmental, neurological, psychiatric, and medical conditions.

Features and benefits

• Provides multiple perspectives. The Parent and Teacher Forms of the BRIEF each contain 86 items that measure different aspects of executive function.

• Specific normative data based on age and gender. Separate normative tables for parent and teacher forms provide T scores, percentiles, and 90% confidence intervals for four developmental age groups by gender of the child.

• Nonoverlapping scales. Theoretically and statistically derived scales measure different aspects of a child or adolescent’s behavior, such as his or her ability to control impulses, move freely from one situation to the next, modulate responses, anticipate future events, and keep track of the effect of his or her behavior on others.

Test structure

• Eight clinical scales (Inhibit, Shift, Emotional Control, Initiate, Working Memory, Plan/Organize, Organization of Materials, Monitor) and two validity scales (Inconsistency and Negativity) give the clinician a well-rounded picture of the behavior of the child or adolescent being rated.

• The clinical scales form two broader Indexes (Behavioral Regulation and Metacognition) and an overall score, the Global Executive Composite.

• The Working Memory and Inhibit scales differentiate among ADHD subtypes.

Technical information

• Normative data are based on child ratings from 1,419 parents and 720 teachers from rural, suburban, and urban areas.

• The clinical sample included children with developmental disorders or acquired neurological disorders (e.g., reading disorder, ADHD subtypes, traumatic brain injury, Tourette’s disorder, mental retardation, localized brain lesions, high functioning autism).

• High internal consistency (αs = .80-.98) and test-retest reliability (rs = .82 for parents, .88 for teachers) were found.