- Psychomotor Skills
- Social-emotional Skills
- Scholastic Skills
- Motivation and Attitude
The IDS-2 measures general development within four domains: Psychomotor Skills, Social-emotional Skills, Scholastic Skills, and Motivation and Attitude.
Psychomotor activity describes the entirety of all control and function processes as well as sensory, perceptive, cognitive and motivational processes that are the basis for posture and movement. In the IDS-2, overall coordination, gross motor skills, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination are recorded in the context of psychomotor activity.
Psychomotor activity plays a crucial role in healthy childhood development. Gross motor skills, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination are often linked to cognitive functions. Furthermore, disruptions in coordination can lead to an inhibition of the development of physical and social capabilities. Psychomotor activity often displays a corresponding relationship with self-esteem, anxiety and somatic problems.
Tests include typical motor tasks such as balancing and working with small beads.
Social-emotional competencies include both constructs of the social and emotional competence. Social competence describes the availability and application of cognitive, emotional and motor behaviors that can lead to a long-term favorable relationship between positive and negative consequences in interpersonal situations. Emotional competence describes the ability to be aware of one’s own feelings, to express them, and to control them independently. The identification and comprehension of emotions of other people are also described as emotional competence.
Social-emotional competencies are closely related to social behavior, well-being, physical health, and academic performance, but are also linked to delinquency, drug abuse and psychopathologies in childhood. Moreover, linguistic competences can be a critical cause variable with respect to social-emotional competence because the communication of feelings and thoughts is a main key component.
Tests include tasks that involve viewing photos and hearing stories, so that recognition of emotions and emotional reactions can be measured.
Specific to each country’s school curriculum, Scholastic skills in linguistic acquisition, reading, spelling, and logical mathematical reasoning are measured.
Language skills include the comprehension of what others are saying or writing (speech comprehension) and one’s own speech or writing (speech production). The acquisition of linguistic skills represents one of the most vital development tasks in early childhood. Linguistic skills have relationships with cognitive and psychosocial development, as well as with social-emotional skills.
Reading and writing are learned during the course of the acquisition of written language. Reading encompasses both reading ability and reading comprehension, and writing includes the processes of segmentation of a phonetic stimulus in phonological units which are then assigned to the respective graphical representation. Written language acquisition constitutes the basis for a successful scholastic and professional career and is related to health and longevity.
Logical mathematical reasoning has always been linked to concrete representations which are activated depending on the problem. Logical-mathematical competences during the final year of kindergarten can foretell the mathematical achievement at the end of the first and second years of school. Furthermore, logical-mathematical competences have been shown to influence the educational and professional opportunities of an individual.
Tests include typical Scholastic skills assessment, including phonological tasks, speech, reading, spelling, and a range of mathematical computations.
Unique to an intelligence battery, the IDS-2 assesses the conscientiousness and performance motivations of the children and adolescents age 11-20. Conscientiousness is linked with precision, reliability, decisiveness, willpower and determination, and is one of the most central personality characteristics in connection with academic and professional success. It exhibits positive correlations with identity development, relationship satisfaction and longevity as well as negative correlations with high-risk behavior.
Performance motivated actions occur when the major incentive for the pursuit of success exists. This can either involve performing particularly well to reach an internal individual standard, or to reach an external reference standard when comparing oneself to others. Performance motivation also exhibits positive correlations with scholastic, academic and professional success and, in addition, can sometimes help to explain variances in intelligence.
These aspects are measured by a series of statements that are rated by the child or adolescent on a four-tiered scale.
