Throughout the history of special education, psychologists have felt that many tests are limited to testing what children are incapable of doing in the school system. Tests were designed to measure how well a child was progressing academically and were not focused on a child’s future outside of the school. Together, Sara Sparrow, David Balla, and Domenic Cicchetti created the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale (Second Edition) to measure a child’s strengths and weaknesses in the areas of communication, living skills, social skills, and motor skills. Adaptive behavior is defined as “the performance of daily activities required for personal and social efficiency.” In other words, it is how well a person performs basic activities in every…show more content… The ABAS-II is an alternate adaptive behavior test to help professionals score, diagnose, as well as classify individuals based on apparent disorders. The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale and the ABAS-II have some similarities and some differences. The ABAS-II is applicable for a wide range of ages, ranging from age zero to ninety eight. While it might be more outdated, the Scales of Independent Behavior is another alternate option to the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale (Oakland and Harrison, 3). The ABAS-II tests three major areas of functioning. These areas include, social interactions, conceptual reasoning, and practical functioning. More specifically, the score is derived from assessing the individual's communication skills, community use, functional activities, home living, health and safety, leisure, self-care, self-direction, social, work, and motor skills. This assessment places a huge emphasis on the individual’s strengths in these specific categories. By identifying the individual’s strengths, professionals are able to provide the individual with the appropriate intervention, in the benefit of the individual. In addition, the rater will monitor the individual in various environments, making the results more reliable. It also helps the rater pinpoint specific weaknesses in specific environments that the individual has, providing a…show more content… For example, a commonly researched and discussed topic is that of individuals with Autism and what the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale truly pinpoints for them. While the assessment does show that individuals with autism have difficulty with socialization, daily living skills, and communication. The research shows that it is important to compare the individuals with autism to each other. Many assessments use general comparisons, however, this will place the individuals with autism at an extremely low percentile, lower than it would be if the individuals were compared to each other (Carter, Volkmar, et. al,