ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the major approaches to the assessment of behavior and development, which can be viewed as the highest level of neurological organization. As the survival of children undergoing corrective heart surgery has improved, end points reflecting children’s quality-of-life are more frequently serving as the focus of outcomes research. The numbers of Mental Scale and Psychomotor Scale items passed are converted to age-standardized scores that are distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16. Abilities considered likely candidates include aspects of information processing such as perception, discrimination, storage, retrieval, and classification. Developmental assessments performed relatively soon after surgery would tend to reflect a mix of a child’s preoperative status and any acute effects of surgery. The field of infant developmental testing continues to evolve as investigators search for more sensitive markers of current function and more accurate predictors of later function.
