A Important Test of Psychological Battery "Bender Gastalt -II"
The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test, or simply the Bender-Gestalt test, is a psychologist test first developed by child neuropsychiatrist Lauretta Bender.
The test is used to evaluate "visual-motor maturity", to screen for
developmental disorders, or to assess neurological function or brain
damage.
The original test consists of nine figures, each on its own 3 × 5
card. The subject is shown each figure and asked to copy it onto a piece
of blank paper. The test typically takes 7–10 minutes, after which the
results are scored based on accuracy and other characteristics.
Bender first described her Visual Motor Gestalt Test in an 1938 monograph entitled: A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use. The figures were derived from the work of the famous Gestalt psychologist Wertheimer.
The Bender-Gestalt test as it is now often called, was typically among
the top five tests used by school and clinical psychologists for
decades.
It measures perceptual motor skills, perceptual motor development, and
gives an indication of neurological intactness. It has been used as a personality test and a test of emotional problems.
The impetus for the clinical use of the Bender Gestalt came in the
late 1930s when Max L. Hutt, an Instructor at the Educational Clinic of
City College of New York became interested in developing a non-verbal
projective personality test. The advantages of such an instrument would
eliminate problems with language as well as prevent the test subjects
from consciously screening their responses and the reproduction of the
nine Bender Test Figures by test subjects could be accomplished in as
little as ten minutes.
Reasoning that providing a test subject with several sheets of blank
paper, a pencil, and explaining that "you are going to be shown some
cards, one at a time, with a simple design on each of them and you are
to copy them as well as you can. Do it any way you think is best for
you. This is not a test of artistic ability, but try to copy the designs
as well as you can" would confront the subject with an ambiguous
problem to solve. With no further instructions and the response of "do
it in any way you think is best" to any questions, the subject was
forced to interpret the task and proceed in a manner that was consistent
with the individuals accustomed personality style.
Hutt subsequently developed a series of "test factors" with
suggestions as to the personality characteristics with which they might
be associated.
However, nothing regarding this preliminary work was published and it
remained out of the main stream of Educational Psychology, which at
that time was virtually limited to intelligence,ability and vocational
interest testing.
However, with the United States entering into World War II in 1941,
Hutt was commissioned in the U.S.Army and assigned as a consultant in
Psychology to the Surgeon General's Office in Washington. The Army was
experiencing a need to quickly train and deploy both Psychiatrists and
Psychologists to meed the vastly increased need of professionals to
diagnose and treat the emotional problems that develop in the stress of
wartime military duty.
Hutt's first assignment was to train Psychologists as clinicians and
he established classes at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, TX. There
he introduced the Bender-Gestalt Test to classes of inducted and
commissioned psychologists who in prior years had experience in
educational clinics, schools, and mental institutions. In 1945 he
published and distributed a mimeographed "Tentative Guide for the
Administration and Interpretation of the Bender-Gestalt Test" which had,
in the previous three years, been widely adopted and utilized in the
U.S. military. The clinicians trained by Hutt and now discharged and
continuing the practice and teaching of Clinical Psychology in civilian
life made the Bender-Gestalt one of the most widely utilized
psychological tests.
Hutt published several articles regarding the Bender Gestalt
subsequently: "The Case of Gregor," J. proj. Tech., 1949, 13 443-446.;
"Revised Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test in Weider, A. (Ed), contributions
toward medical psychology. N.Y. Ronald Press, 1950; "Interpretation of a
Bender-Gestalt Record" in Shneidman, E. S. (Ed) Thematic Test
Analyses,N.Y. Grune and Stratton, 1951.
In 1959, Hutt met with a former student and recent Army Officer and
Psychologist, Dr.Gerald J. Briskin,who had served during the Korean War
and who had made considerable use of the Bender-Gestalt during his
military service. Briskin had acquired extensive experience with that
test in treating and diagnosing brain damage and stress related
psychological and psychiatric disorders.
Their discussions and exchange of clinical findings led to the
decision to bring their joint extensive experience with the Bender
Gestalt in one definitive volume and that led to the publication of "The
Clinical use of the Revised Bender-Gestalt Test, N.Y. Grune and
Stratton, 1960.
Subsequently, Elizabeth M. Koppitz adopted several of the Hutt and
Briskin scoring factors in her subsequent work, "The Bender-Gestalt Test
for Young Children, N.Y. Grune and Stratton, 1964
The test has been used as a screening device for brain damage. Bender
herself said it was "a method of evaluating maturation of gestalt
functioning children 4-11's brain functioning by which it responds to a
given constellation of stimuli as a whole, the response being a motor
process of patterning the perceived gestalt."
Originally published by the American Orthopsychiatric Association, it
was purchased in the 1990s by Riverside Publishing company and released
with a revised qualitative scoring system as the Bender-II under the
direction of Dr. Gary Brannigan and Dr. Scott L. Decker. The Bender-II
contains 16 figures versus 9 in the original. The new or revised scoring
system for the Bender-II was developed based on empirical investigation
of numerous scoring systems. The Global Scoring System was,
tangentially related to Bender's original scoring method and a revision
of a system devised by Branigan in the 1980s, was selected based on
reliability and validity studies, as well as its ease of use and
construct clarity. Elizabeth Koppitz, a clinical child psychologist and
school psychologist (who worked most of her career in the Mount Kisco schools in New York),
developed a scoring system in the 1960s devoted to assessing the
maturation of visual-motor skills in children, remaining true to
Bender's aim for the test, and popularized its use in the schools. For
decades, the Koppitz version, known as the Bender-Gestalt Test for Young
Children, was one of the most frequently used scoring systems for the
Bender-Gestalt in the United States. After Koppitz' death in the early
1980s the use of the method held its popularity until the mid1990s when
it was withdrawn from the market as a result of publishing company
consolidations.
Steve Mathews and Cecil Reynolds (a friend of Koppitz for some years
near the end of her life) were eventually able to locate the publishing
rights to the Koppitz version of the Bender-Gestalt, and these rights
were subsequently acquired by Pro-Ed Publishing Company of Austin Texas,
who then retained Cecil Reynolds to revise the Koppitz version. It was
released under Reynolds' authorship in 2007 by Pro-Ed as the Koppitz-2:
The Koppitz Developmental Scoring System for the Bender-Gestalt Test. A
portion of the proceeds of all sales of the Koppitz-2 go to the American
Psychological Foundation to support the Koppitz scholarships in child
clinical psychology
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