A Scoring System For Organization Level At the RCFT test

 

Anderson, Anderson, and Garth developed a scoring system for the Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) that emphasizes the child’s organizational ability. The article, which is freely available online, includes the complete scoring system and its scoring criteria, as well as normative data for children between the ages of 7 and 13.

The Rey Complex Figure Test assesses learning efficiency. Performance during the copying stage also requires spatial-processing skills and executive functions, particularly planning and organization: deciding what to copy first and what to copy later, developing a strategy for copying the figure, and monitoring performance throughout the process.

A child who uses an effective strategy will generally begin with the figure’s major elements. These elements serve as anchors into which the child integrates the figure’s more peripheral details. A child who uses an ineffective strategy may have difficulty distinguishing between major and minor elements, focus on details, move unsystematically from one area of the figure to another, and struggle to understand how the details relate to one another to form a coherent whole. Previous research has shown that children’s ability to use effective strategies improves with age.

During the recall stage of the RCFT, I believe that the child retrieves from long-term memory not only the figure itself, but also the performance strategy that was developed for reconstructing the figure on the page. In other words, the child retrieves both the content—the form of the figure itself—and the process or procedure that was developed: the strategy for reproducing the figure.

Anderson and colleagues note that a child may copy the figure or reproduce it from memory successfully even without having developed an effective strategy. The reverse is also true: a child who has developed an effective strategy will not necessarily produce a good final product, for example because of difficulties in visuospatial processing. In general, however, the more effective the strategy, the better the final product.

I have never been satisfied with the cumbersome scoring system we use, developed by Meyers and Meyers in 1995. This scoring system requires us to learn detailed rules for scoring every element of the figure.

The Rey Complex Figure Test inherently involves a tension between emphasizing accuracy and emphasizing organization and placement. Meyers and Meyers instruct the psychologist to disregard minor inaccuracies, such as lines that are not straight, and minor distortions. In many cases, they use the endpoints of a line, rather than the extent to which it is straight, to determine the accuracy score for an item.

Although this reflects an effort to focus on the copied element itself rather than on the motor precision with which it was produced, the Meyers and Meyers scoring system does not distinguish among the different elements of the figure and does not award higher scores to elements that are more central to its structure.

The scoring system proposed by Anderson, Anderson, and Garth attempts to make such a distinction. It also emphasizes the order in which the child copies the elements, based on the assumption that a child with good organizational ability will begin by copying the central elements. Under this system, the child can receive a score ranging from 1, indicating that the figure is drawn in an unrecognizable manner, to 7, indicating an excellent level of organization.

The study by Anderson and colleagues included 376 children between the ages of 7 years and 13 years 11 months, with approximately 50 to 60 children in each age group. The children were randomly sampled and had no history of developmental, neurological, or psychiatric difficulties, and no history of receiving special education services.

The test was administered individually to each child by a psychologist. The child changed the color of the pencil being used every 30 seconds. When using the Meyers and Meyers scoring method, pencils should not be changed. Nevertheless, if we record the copying process ourselves—which is recommended and important in any event—we can still use Anderson and colleagues’ scoring system.

This is despite the fact that, in my opinion, changing pencils alters performance because of the distraction caused by the change and because it can result in a single element being drawn in two different colors, making it more difficult to perceive that element as a coherent whole.

The researchers found that the strategy adopted by the child during the copying stage was related both to copying accuracy and to the accuracy with which the figure was subsequently retrieved from memory. The more effective the strategy used by the child, the more accurately the figure was reproduced, both during copying and during recall.

The authors report correlations between the children’s scores on the RCFT organization scale and their scores on other tests, including the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (Rey-AVLT), the Trail Making Test, Digit Span, and Story Recall.

The more effectively a child approached the RCFT—that is, the higher the child’s score on the organization scale—the better the child tended to perform on these other tests. In general, however, the correlation between the RCFT organization score and performance on any one of these tests was not strong.

Only one child in the sample received the maximum organization score of 7, and no child received the minimum score of 1. Probably for this reason, the researchers combined children who received scores of 1, 2, or 3 into a single group representing weak strategies. They also combined children who received scores of 6 or 7 into a single group representing conceptual, or effective, strategies.

In general, the use of weak strategies decreased with age, whereas the use of conceptual strategies increased with age. Unexpected results were obtained, however, during early adolescence, between the ages of 12 and 14. More children between the ages of 12 and 14 used detail-focused approaches than at any other age.

Approximately one quarter of the 11-year-old children and about 30% of the 12-year-old children used effective strategies, compared with only 14% of children between the ages of 13 and 14. I did not find the researchers’ proposed explanations for this phenomenon convincing. Nevertheless, these findings may indicate that the development of organizational strategies continues beyond the age of 14.

 

Anderson, P., Anderson, V., & Garth, J. (2001). Assessment and development of organizational ability: The Rey Complex Figure Organizational Strategy Score (RCF-OSS). The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 15(1), 81–94.