The National Adult Reading Test (NART) - a preliminary validation study on a Maltese tertiary education population

Abstract

The popularity of the National Adult Reading Test (NART) and the North American Adult Reading Test (NAART) as measures of pre-morbid intellectual ability and as accurate estimates of IQ in healthy samples evoked an interest to conduct this preliminary validation study to assess how a Maltese tertiary education population faired on these tests. The National Adult Reading Test-revised (NART-R; Crawford, /990) or the North American Adult Reading Test (NAART; Blair & Spreen, 1989) was administered on a randomly allocated sample of Maltese tertiary education students and graduates (N=50). The Extended River Mead Behavioural Memory Test (ERBMT) was used as a baseline test to allow for comparisons between the two groups. The results yielded a significant difference in performance between the two NARTINAART groups with a greater number of errors resulting from the NAART group. Comparisons on the overall performance between groups on the ERBMT and on one of the subtests of the ERBA!T reflecting semantic memory, yielded no significant difference, indicating that the NARTINAART performances were not a result of pre-existing intellectual group differences. Conversion of NARTINAART scores into WAIS-r IQ's revealed a lower mean IQ than that estimated for tertiary education students or graduates. This observation raises the question of whether the two forms of NART correctly reflect the performance capacity of Maltese graduates and students.