Artifact Analysis Flashcards
Artifact analysis _______
Linking language disorders to academic performance and educational impact
Four sources of comprehensive assessment
Academic activities is where you will find an artifact analysis
Class work is an artifact
The how to of artifact analysis
General principles apply across disorder areas (artic/phono, language, voice, fluency)
Gather evidence of education performance
- Classroom work products
- Curriculum benchmarking measures
- SOLs
Analyze whether the communication deficit limits academic achievement
What does artifact analysis answer?
ANSWERS: What does this school work tell me about this student’s __________ system?
Phonological, Semantic, Morphological, Syntactic, Pragmatic, Orthographic, Expository Text skills
Remember: SLPs are uniquely trained to think through these questions & this is the added value that you bring to educational settings
For each subsystem, ask yourself a series of questions
What (system) content was understood in this activity?
What (system) content was produced in this activity?
What can the student do correctly (within this subsystem)?
Where do errors occur?- errors of commission
What does the student attempt to do?
What does the student not attempt to do?
How much could the student do independently?– ZPD
What scaffolds were offered and resulted in success? –ZPD
What scaffolds were offered but didn’t help? –ZPD
Phonological/orthographic knowledge
List words that are repeated
- Make a list of different spellings of the same word
- What does this say about phonological awareness?
Analyze vowel patterns
List graphemes that are: consistently used correctly, inconsistent, or not used
Semantic knowledge
Count (TNW, Total different wds, synonyms/antonyms)
Consider lexical level of words used
Look for indicators of HO Semantics (Fig lang, non literal lang)
Morphological knowledge
Which grammatical morphemes are: consistently written correctly, inconsistently written, or omitted.
Any evidence of derivational morphemes? Which derivational morphemes would be expected? To know this we can look at curriculum/common core/ SOLs
Are written morphological structures consistent with spoken language?
Syntactic knowledge
What type of sentence structures are consistently used correctly
- Simple sentences
- Complex sentences
Are any sentence structures that are attempted but errored?
What sentence structures would be expected?
Is writing differentiated from speaking?
Pragmatic knowledge
How aware is the author of the reader and their needs
Expository text knowledge
Is the paragraph well organized and matches the task? Opening statement, supportive details, closing summary
Writing Mechanics: Punctuation, word spacing
Topic maintenance and development?
When writing with purpose, our topic must be organized to transfer info well from one head to another head
Are the needs of the reader addressed?
Is there evidence of literate language or “sparkle”? : Is it interesting, are there APs and NPs, mental and linguistic verbs, conjunctions, etc.
Examining school work this way allows you to systematically observe and describe functional language abilities
Phonological knowledge
Morphological knowledge
Semantic knowledge
Syntactic knowledge
Pragmatic knowledge
Orthographic knowledge
Expository Text knowledge
When artifact analysis results ARE consistent with tests and probes
Tests = deficient
Classroom performance is inadequate (sys obs)
Tests: WNL
Classroom performance is adequate (sys obs)
This is called “converging evidence”
What is converging evidence
Builds support for validity of assessment data
(Documents that educational performance is impacted by the communication deficit )
When artifact analysis results are NOT consistent with test and probe results
Tests= deficient
Educational impact is not substantial
Tests= WNL
Classroom performance is inadequate
Provides documentation that a communication deficit is not limiting educational achievement
No functional impact!!! One of the questions on the eligibility worksheet (comparing these two types of data to interpret if SLI impacts education or if it is a different factor)
Informs team decision about Sp Ed eligibility (not eligible due to SLI), so not eligible for services in a school environment (could go private practice, etc.)
Helps to prevent inappropriate eligibility decision making due to measurement error or invalid testing
When to analyze artifacts?
AFTER decontextualized testing
Do areas of deficit show up in class work?
If yes: How often? In what subject areas? Does this limit performance? What helps? What doesn’t help?: Informs description of educational impact of deficit; Supports tx planning
If no: Documents lack of educational impact
You can also analyze artifacts ________
BEFORE decontextualized testing
No single right way
Reiterative process: might want to analyze, do one text, analyze another sample, do another test, etc. That’s why we have 60 days! To be thorough!
Informs assessment decisions: Undertake additional assessment only when relevant to classroom work, Select assessment instruments/strategies
What to document?
Too much info to document everything!
Prioritize language subsystem data and findings according to your informed expertise and as appropriate for each student.
Report relative strengths and weaknesses
Compare academic performance to other assessment data
Report accordingly
Writing the report: 2 options- Opt 1
Threading
After reporting the results for each assessment instrument, add a paragraph that describes corroborating or contradicting evidence from the artifact analysis
The results of the TNL are consistent with/are contradicted by Xs classroom performance as documented by analysis of Xs language arts homework and daily journaling. These classroom work products revealed…”
Option 2 Report Writing
Add “artifact analysis section to the eval report
Describe the corpus of academic artifacts (What documents, From which courses/classes/teachers, How collected)
Describe data for each area of literate language and/or subsystem (Counts of correct, incorrect productions; Strengths, weaknesses, supports; Stimulability if probed; Clausal density, if calc’d)
Performance indicators for the features that you analyze (Performance expectations (SOLs, CC, teacher, community expectations/norms))
Main takeawayss
SLPs can assess academic performance from perspective of speech-language skill filter
Uniquely prepared to do so
“Value added resource”
You can do this 😀
