The Chc Cross-battery Assessment Approach

The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Cross-Battery Assessment approach (hereafter referred to as the XBA approach) was introduced by Flanagan and her colleagues in the late 1990s (Flanagan & The XBA approach provides practitioners with the means to make systematic, valid, and up-to-date interpretations of intelligence batteries and to augment them with other tests in a way that is consistent with the empirically supported CHC theory of cognitive abilities. Moving beyond the boundaries of a single intelligence test kit by adopting the psychometrically and theoretically defensible XBA principles and procedures represents a significantly improved According to Carroll (1997), the CHC taxonomy of human cognitive abilities " appears to prescribe that individuals should be assessed with respect to the total range of abilities the theory specifies " (p. 129). However, because Carroll recognized that " any such prescription would of course create enormous problems, " he indicated that " [r]esearch is needed to spell out how the assessor can select what abilities need to be tested in particular cases " (p. 129). Flanagan and colleagues' XBA approach was developed specifically to " spell out " how practitioners can conduct assessments that approximate the total range of broad cognitive abilities more adequately than what is possible with most single intelligence batteries. In a review of the XBA approach, Carroll (1998) stated that it " can be used to develop the most appropriate information about an individual in a given testing situation " (p. xi). In Kaufman's (2000) review of XBA, he stated that the approach is based on sound assessment principles, adds theory to psychometrics, and improves the quality of the assessment and interpretation of cognitive abilities and processes.