Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test

Lauretta Bender's Visual Motor Gestalt Test was developed in 1938 and is commonly referred to as the Bender-Gestalt Test (published by Riverside Publishing Company, http://www.riversidepublishing.com). It consists of a series of designs printed on individual cards, to be copied by the examinee with pencil and paper. Bender's scoring system evaluated the overall quality of each design and provided an assessment of visual-motor functioning. For comparative purposes, Bender provided graphs and a summary chart of the types of drawings made by children from 3 to 11 years of age. Over the next 65 years, a number of variations in administering and scoring the test emerged to assess visual-motor functioning, psychopathology, and organic brain dysfunction in children and adults. Some of the more prominent variations included scoring systems that examined specific errors (e.g., failure to integrate parts of [Page 86]designs, rotation of designs, simplification of parts of designs), the use of a background interference procedure during administration of the test (paper containing random lines provided), and a reduction of the number of designs for administration to preschool and early-primary-school children. The test enjoyed considerable success among practitioners and became one of the most widely used tests in psychology.

The revision of the test in 2003 included the addition of several new designs; a memory test; separate tests to assess motor skill and visual perception; a new, easy-to-use scoring system; and a large, nationally representative sample covering the ages 4 to 85+ years. Administration involves the copy phase, followed immediately by the memory phase. In the copy phase, the examinee is instructed to copy each design as it is presented. The memory phase requires the examinee to redraw as many of the designs as possible from memory. Scoring is based on a 5-point scale that assesses the overall quality of each drawing. Standard scores and percentile scores are available for both the copy and the memory phases. If an examinee's scores are low, the supplemental motor and perception tests can be administered to help determine whether the examinee's difficulty is motoric, perceptual, or the integrated visual-motor process.

Research on nonclinical samples as well as a variety of clinical samples, such as individuals with learning disabilities, mental retardation, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, and Alzheimer's disease, indicates that the test is a reliable, valid measure of visual-motor functioning and a useful addition to educational, psychological, and neuropsychological test batteries.