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Childhood Autism Rating Scale

Behavior rating scale intended to help diagnose autism

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 28, 2025
Entity authorityQ2424099 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) is a behavior rating scale intended to help diagnose autism. CARS was developed by Eric Schopler, Robert J. Reichler, and Barbara Rochen Renner. The scale was designed to help differentiate children with autism from those with other developmental delays, such as intellectual disability.

Although there is no gold standard among rating scales in detecting autism, CARS is frequently used as part of the diagnostic process.

Evaluation criteria

The CARS is a diagnostic assessment method that rates individuals on a scale ranging from normal to severe, and yields a composite score ranging from non-autistic to mildly autistic, moderately autistic, or severely autistic. The scale is used to observe and subjectively rate fifteen items.

relationship to people

imitation

emotional response

body

object use

adaptation to change

visual response

listening response

taste-smell-touch response and use

fear and nervousness

verbal communication

non-verbal communication

activity level

level and consistency of intellectual response

general impressions

Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism

The Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism (ISAA) was developed by the Indian National Institute for the Mentally Handicapped in 2009. Analogous to, and congruent with, CARS, it is tailored to the Indian milieux, being available in several regional languages.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Childhood Autism Rating Scale” as behavior rating scale intended to help diagnose autism. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2009—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Childhood, Autism and Rating can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as behavior rating scale intended to help diagnose autism. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2424099. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Childhood Autism Rating Scale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.