Abstract

The purpose of present study was to establish the Korean developmental norms of BGT using the Koppitz scoring system for children in 177 normal children with age from 5 to 10(boy 88, girl 89), and examine the clinical utility of BGT as a tool for detecting brain damage in clinical group(27 attention deficit hyperactivity disordered, and 27 brain damaged) between the age of 7 and 9. To this end, BGT was administered to all subjects, and their total errors were scored by the Koppitz scoring system for children. To determine the cut-off score for detecting brain damage, the means and standard deviations of total error scores for normal group were used to calculate the cut-off scores for each age group, respectively. In normal group the means of total error scores were decreased according to the increase of age, and that was less than l at age of 9. These results suggest that normal children older than 9 perform very well on BGT without any error, which support the validity of BGT in assessing the maturity of visual-motor coordination ability. There were significant differences among the normal, the attention deficit hyperactivity disordered, and the brain damaged groups on the means of total error scores. The cut-off score of 5 classified 90% of the normals and 100% of the brain damaged correctly at age 7(percentage of overall correct classification=95%), and the cut-off score of 4 classified 100% of the normals and 85.7% of the brain damaged correctly at age 8(percentage of overall correct classification= 94%). These results put together support the validity of BGT as a tool for diagnosing brain damage. But when the cut-off score of 3 was used at age 9, the percentage of overall correct classification was decreased to 77.8%, suggesting that in order to detecting brain damage in older children, the norms of BGT must be strict and other neuropsychological tests as well as BGT be administered.