Wender Utah Style Childhood ADHD Test: Look Back at Ages 6 to 12 and See Where Your Signs Clustered

The test has 25 statements about what you were like as a child, between roughly ages 6 and 12. Each one is rated from not at all (0) to very much (4), so the total runs from 0 to 100, the same format and range as the published WURS-25 short form. The breakdown splits your total across five areas, five statements each: attention and focus, impulsivity and restlessness, temper and mood, school and learning, and friendships and authority. Those five groups are our own; the published scale reports a single total.

The three bands on this page, few, some and many childhood signs, are educational thirds, not clinical cutoffs. The published WURS-25 has a research cutoff from its original validation study, but that number applies to the published items and their validation sample, not to these original statements, so we do not use it here. A high score means you remember a childhood with many of the patterns the scale was built around; it does not establish ADHD, and a low score does not rule it out, especially for people whose childhood signs were quiet rather than disruptive.

The Wender Utah Rating Scale was developed at the University of Utah by Paul Wender and colleagues and published by Ward, Wender and Reimherr in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1993. The full version has 61 items; the 25-item short form uses the items that best separated adults with ADHD from adults without it and from adults with depression. Its purpose is retrospective: because ADHD must begin in childhood to be diagnosed, a clinician assessing an adult needs some evidence that the pattern was there early, and the WURS gives the adult a structured way to report it. It is widely used in research and clinics, and it has been translated and validated in many languages.

The published items are copyrighted by the journal and are not in the public domain, so this page does not reproduce them. Instead we wrote 25 original statements covering the same childhood territory, in the same response format and total range, and we say so everywhere the scale is named. That matters for one practical reason: if a clinician asks you to complete the WURS-25, your score there may differ from your score here, and theirs is the one that counts. Think of this page as a rehearsal of the same conversation.

A childhood score is one half of the picture. The other half is what is happening now, and the standard screener for that is the ASRS, the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale developed with the World Health Organization; our Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) Test page reproduces it, and our ADHD Test (Adult) page offers a broader current-symptoms screener. Taking a childhood test and a current test together is closer to what a clinician actually does. A high score on both is a strong reason to seek a formal assessment. A high current score with a low childhood score can mean the childhood signs were quiet, or it can point toward something other than ADHD, such as anxiety, depression, sleep problems or burnout, all of which can look like inattention in adulthood.

Some groups are more likely to score low here despite having ADHD. Girls and people who were inattentive rather than hyperactive often had childhoods that looked fine from the outside, because daydreaming and disorganization draw less notice than disruption; our ADHD Test for Women page looks at that pattern. If the areas that stood out for you were attention and school rather than restlessness and temper, the Executive Function Test and Time Blindness Test tests look at the specific skills involved, in adulthood, where they tend to matter most.

If your total was in the many-signs range, or if one area was high and that area still describes your adult life, the useful next step is a formal assessment with a psychiatrist, psychologist or specialist clinician. Bring this result along with a current-symptoms screener, and, if you can, something from the time itself: a school report, a parent's or sibling's memory, a teacher's comment. Clinicians value that outside evidence precisely because adult memory of childhood is imperfect. An assessment can also tell apart ADHD from the conditions that mimic it, which no questionnaire can do.

If your total was low but the search that brought you here was driven by real difficulty now, do not let a childhood score close the question. Take the current-symptoms screener, pay attention to sleep, mood and stress, and talk to a professional about what is actually getting in the way. Whatever the number, a childhood with many of these patterns is not a judgment on who you were; it is a description of a nervous system that worked differently in a setting that was not built for it, and adults who understand that often feel relief rather than loss.