Are children comfortable completing ASQ-3 activities?
ASQ-3 is versatile, flexible, culturally sensitive, and designed to be administered at home. This means children can be tested in their usual environment and at the parents’ convenience. Activities allow children to play, move about, and practice daily living skills. They often involve home items like cereal boxes an…
I am a new director at a child care center, and I am interested in screening all of our children. Would it be best for me to complete the ASQ questionnaires or would it be best for the teachers of the children to complete them?
ASQ was developed and validated as a parent-completed tool, and it is recommended that parents complete the questionnaire. However, a caregiver or teacher who spends at least 20 hours a week with the child may also complete the questionnaires. It is important that the person completing the questionnaire is familiar w…
Do you have tips for administering questionnaires when a parent has a known mental illness such as bipolar, schizophrenia, or active chemical use?
The ASQ developers recommend having both the parent and another adult providing care for the child separately complete ASQ questionnaires. Parents with mental illness may be able to observe their child and provide valid and reliable information despite their symptoms. If the parent is an involved parent, it would be …
Does the ASQ-3 require utilizing adjusted age with both pre-term infants (e.g., 20 weeks, 0 days to 36 weeks, 6 days), as well as early term infants (e.g., 37 weeks, 0 days to 38 weeks, 6 days)?
Adjusted age is used when a child is born 3 or more weeks premature. When conducting research for ASQ-3, the authors used 39 weeks as a full-term pregnancy. A child born at 36 weeks of gestation or earlier would be considered premature and would need an adjusted age calculated until 2 years chronological age. Some pr…
Most parents don’t see their child interact with peers because they do this at preschool or child care. How will their answers to these questions be valid?
Most parents see their children interact with peers—during playdates, at birthday parties, at social events, in the neighborhood, in the community, on sports teams, and so forth. For children who have been in a preschool or child care environment, parents typically have seen and heard about their children’s social in…
Is ASQ-3 going to be released as a child assessment tool? When will it be ready?
No, there are not any plans to release ASQ-3 as an assessment tool. The developers are currently researching whether the items from ASQ can be combined and expanded into an evaluation tool. But, the developers' work is still in the experimental stage.
Are there available benchmarks to use to determine if programs are finding the same percentage of questionnaires in the referral area as the national or state-wide average?
The breakdown of ASQ-3 questionnaire results (typical, monitoring, referral) depends greatly upon the population of children served by your program. In the national normative sample used to examine the psychometric properies of ASQ-3, an average of 15.5% of children fell below the cutoff score in at least one domain.…
What should take the place of an ASQ-3 for a 30-month-old with suspected autism that is already receiving multiple therapies through early intervention?
If a child is already receiving therapies through early intervention, use of a screening tool like ASQ-3 is not needed. A curriculum-based assessment tool can be used to determine a child’s current level of functioning, identify goals, and monitor progress. Examples of curriculum-based assessments include the Assess…
Our agency is converting to an electronic health record and phasing out paper files. Are we allowed to scan completed ASQ forms into our EHR? Are we allowed to enter the domain scores for the ASQ-3 in our EHR?
Yes, users are allowed to scan a completed questionnaire, including the Information Summary sheet, and save a copy in your EHR system. Users are also allowed to enter domain scores into your EHR; it is also allowable to enter responses or scores for individual items on ASQ-3 or ASQ:SE-2 into your EHR system. Formal w…
My child has been diagnosed with expressive language disorder and is receiving early intervention. Do you recommend completing ASQ-3 to track development in other domains?
If a child is receiving services through an early intervention program, their overall development is probably being monitored regularly with yearly, more in-depth assessments than ASQ-3. However, you can choose to complete ASQ-3 questionnaires to check development in areas not affected by expressive language disorder…
