| Summary: | An assessment of Visual Perceptual skills for children of pre-school age (three to four- and-a-half years) was designed. Twenty-one subtests utilise three-dimensional play material where possible to maintain the interest and involvement of young children. Requirements for comprehension of verbal instructions are minimised, as is the necessity for accurate movement responses, making the assessment suitable for use with children who have delayed development and who may have Special Educational Needs such as physical disabilities, language disorder, or learning difficulties, and with non-English speaking children. Normative data was collected from a preliminary standardisation sample of one hundred children aged from two-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years. The Assessment was also administered to twenty children for whom English was not their mother tongue and forty-five children designated as having Special Educational Needs who suffered from a variety of handicaps. Those children whom their teachers suspected of being perceptually impaired were accurately identified by the Assessment. A small group of Down's Syndrome children were also tested, and most were found not to have a specific impairment in visual perception when this was compared to their general level of cognitive development. Good evidence of test-re-test and inter-rater reliability was demonstrated. Validation as established by correlation with existing measures of visual perception.
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