Measurement of attention deficit: correspondence between rating scales and tests of sustained and selective attention.

The correspondence between teachers' ratings of students' attention and measures of sustained and selective attention was examined. Subjects were 26 adolescents who were selected on the basis of ratings from among 100 students with educable mental retardation (EMR). The top 13 and the bottom 13 subjects in the ratings were designated as the good and the poor attenders. A 10-minute auditory vigilance test and an adapted version of Posner's physical and name identity task were given to the good and poor attenders. Results showed that whereas the vigilance task did not discriminate between the two groups, the Posner's task did. The former group was faster than the latter in both physical- and name-matching, suggesting that groups divided in attention ratings by teachers could be differentiated by increasing the strength of distractors.