Children’s Organizational Skills Scale (COSS™)

Howard Abikoff, Ph.D., Richard Gallagher, Ph.D.

Age Range 8–13
Administration Time 10–15 minutes
Administration Type Parent-completed, Teacher-completed, Child-completed
Qualification Level B

Description
The COSS is designed to help the assessor understand how children organize their time, their materials, and their actions to accomplish important tasks at home and at school. The COSS quantifies organizational skills for children aged 8 to 13 based on ratings from parents, teachers, and the child. The Children’s Organizational Skills Scales (COSS™ ) is a comprehensive measure of organizational skills, including:
• Assessment of a child’s overall competence in managing task demands at home and school (i.e., domain specific)
• Delineation of a child’s competence in planning tasks, tracking assignments, managing materials and time
• Identification of a child’s organizational strengths and weaknesses relative to the normative sample
• Assessment of the level of conflict at home related to a child’s organizational problems

How to Use the Assessment
Rating scales are available in parent, teacher, and self-report form formats. The COSS scales include Task Planning, Organizes Actions, and Memory and Materials Management. An Inconsistency Index is available on all three forms. This index is useful for determining response patterns that can affect results due to careless/random responding. The self-report form also contains a Positive Impression Index to help identify inaccurate representation of problems by making situations appear better than they really are has a negative attitude toward the testing process