Assessing the Adaptive Behavior of

more stringent, formally defined, and nonbiased procedures for determin-ing eligibility for special education programs. According to Coulter and Morrow, the Education of the Handi-capped Act-Part B, as amended by P.L. 93-380, requires each state to es-tablish procedures concerning non-discriminatory testing and evaluation of public school students. 1 Tradition-ally, intelligence tests have been used to differentiate between students who are mentally retarded and those who are not. These devices have been crit-icized for providing a narrow inter-pretation of the child's functioning and for being culturally biased or in-sensitive to individual differences as-sociated with minority-group status and socioeconomic background. One approach to the issue of non-discriminatory assessment is the combined use of data from an IQ test and an assessment of the student's adaptive behavior, which the Ameri-can Association of Mental Deficiency (AAMD) defines as "the effectiveness or degree with which an individual meets the standards of personal inde-pendence and social responsibility expected of his age and cultural group. "2 The assessment of adaptive behavior is intended to formalize data concerning the child's functioning in nonacademic as well as academic set-tings. The purpose of this article is to in-troduce the reader briefly to a general theoretical perspective from which to approach the assessment of adaptive behavior of school-age children. An overview of several useful criteria for selecting adaptive behavior measures and a brief review of several currently used adaptive behavior instruments are discussed here. Practitioners working with mentally retarded chil-dren and youths in a variety of set