Development of the pediatric test of brain injury

Objective: The Pediatric Test of Traumatic Brain Injury (PTBI)¹ (currently in its research edition) is a tool for assessing the cognitive-linguistic skills of school-aged children and adolescents in acute care and rehabilitation settings after traumatic brain injury. Development of the PTBI was motivated by the fact that, to date, no standardized test has been available to assess the full range of cognitive-linguistic impairments associated with pediatric brain injury. In this article we describe how the research edition of the PTBI was developed, provide rationale for the areas of assessment, discuss a plan for standardization, and illustrate its use with three children with TBI. Design: The PTBI was constructed to sample the attention, memory, language, reading, writing, metalinguistic, and metacognitive skills that are particularly at risk in pediatric brain injury and that are relevant to the general education curriculum. Material: The test material for the PTBI was selected on the basis of clinical and experimental evidence that children and adolescents with TBI demonstrate a wide range of cognitive and language deficits. These first appear in the early stages of recovery and often persist but change over time. Conclusion: Our goal is to standardize the PTBI so it can be used to establish baseline behaviors and track cognitive-linguistic recovery.