Hierarchical Factor Structure of the Cognitive Assessment System: Variance Partitions from the Schmid-Leiman (1957) Procedure

Orthogonal higher-order factor structure of the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS; Naglieri & Das, 1997a) for the 5-7 and 8-17 age groups in the CAS standardization sample is reported. Following the same procedure as recent studies of other prominent intelligence tests (Dombrowski, Watkins, & Brogan, 2009; Canivez, 2008; Canivez & Watkins, 2010a, 2010b; Nelson & Canivez, 2011; Nelson, Canivez, Lindstrom, & Hatt, 2007; Watkins, 2006; Watkins, Wilson, Kotz, Carbone, & Babula, 2006), three- and four-factor CAS exploratory factor extractions were analyzed with the Schmid and Leiman (1957) procedure using MacOrtho (Watkins, 2004) to assess the hierarchical factor structure by sequentially partitioning variance to the second- and first- order dimensions as recommended by Carroll (1993, 1995). Results showed that greater portions of total and common variance were accounted for by the second-order, global factor, but compared to other tests of intelligence CAS subtests measured less second-order variance and greater first-order Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) factor variance. (Contains 4 tables.)