A Rural vs Urban Normative Study Of The Chicago Early Assessment.

The Chicago EARLY Asessment Test was developed, normed, and validated in inner city Chicago. It was designed to predict children ages three to five years-old with learning disabilities. The EARLY Assessment screens for deficiencies in gross motor, fine motor, language, visual discrimination and memory skills. This study screened 44 children in the rural community of Big Rapids, Michigan. The purpose was to establish whether the
established norms for the EARLY could be used to assess children in a rural community.
A Chi-squared test of goodness of fit was performed comparing the expected frequency, based on the norms in the EARLY manual, to the observed frequency. The analysis shows that the established norms were adequate for both urban and rural populations with one
exception. There was a statistically significant difference in the children ages 4.7-5.0 years old in the areas of both language and visual discrimination. In these areas our subjects scored almost exclusively in the 80-100 percentile when compared to the EARLY Norms.