Principles of Language Assessment with School Aged Students Flashcards
VDOE SLI Eligibility Worksheet: 5 steps
- Know the definition of a sp-lang impairment
- Significant discrepancy?——– Each school division has the right to determine what is significant. It’s up to the states to make sure the districts comply with the fed regulations, some states have put the power in the hands of the school districts to decide how they want to comply with the regulations. VDOE allows local school district control, so practically if you work for one school district for 5 years and their significant discrepancy is 2 SD below mean, but you go to a new one and their significant discrepancy is 1.5 SD below mean.
- NOT LEP or dialect
- Educational impact
- Needs specially designed instruction
Significant discrepancy variations
Each school division has the right to determine what is significant. It’s up to the states to make sure the districts comply with the fed regulations, some states have put the power in the hands of the school districts to decide how they want to comply with the regulations. VDOE allows local school district control, so practically if you work for one school district for 5 years and their significant discrepancy is 2 SD below mean, but you go to a new one and their significant discrepancy is 1.5 SD below mean.
How do these questions answer our eligibility decisions
4 questions that must be answered for every student when making an eligibility decision. Our assessments must answer these questions to back up our decisions as professionals.
Language Assessment Data across contexts
Across contexts: to document educational impact (on the playground vs different subjects vs in the lunchroom, etc.)
Areas of language assessment data
Form (phonology, morphology, syntax)
Content (semantics)
Use (pragmatics)
Modalities of language assessment data
Oral
Written
Receptive
Expressive (Oral-Receptive, Oral-Expressive, Written-Receptive, Written-Expressive)
In order to address eligibility
You NEED data from FOUR sources
2 methods and 2 contexts
Four sources for a comprehensive assessment
How are we gathering data? (method)
Systematic observations
Measurement
From what contexts:
School-based data
Speech-language specific data
- Student interacts with SLP for sp-lang specific data (obs and measure)
- Student interacts with other people for school based data (obs and measure)
Big- Picture: Meta-level processes
2 methods of gathering data (HOW)
- Systematic observation
- Measurement
2 contexts of gathering data (CONTEXT)
- School based activities
- SLP specific activities
Academic activities
(how funct is language, do they support their funct life?)= Obs x School Activities
Artifact analysis
Curriculum based assessment
Observations in school settings
Educational records
Contextualized tests
(meas x school based data)- form of measurement that the SLP does not perform but looks at to see academic performance
Norm referenced measures of academic achievements (via school district)
Curriculum benchmarks (everyone in the grade takes these for same subject, or everyone in one class takes x exam)
State achievement tests (SOLs or common core)
Speech-Language Probes
(sp-lang spec data x obs)- specifically to understand comm skills. There are tons of probes!!! Totally different from published assessments.
Case hx
Interviews (w client, parent, teachers)
Language/Narrative samples (conv or narrative sample)
Stimulability
Dynamic assessment
Play-based assessment
Decontextualized tests
(meas x sp-lang spec data)- norm referenced assessments that give us a look at how students stack up in smaller categories of speech and language and if that reflects their abilities.
Norm referenced sp-lang tests (parsed skills: arctic, semantics, syntax, morphology, narration, pragmatics, fluency, etc.)
Be aware of caveats: functional communication is not the same as seen in these tests, this is completely separate and serves to parse out skills one by one to provide hard data and set up a pathway for future student goals
Spaulding 2006 LSHSS
43 tests reviewed (silent guess # report sens/spec)
Looked at psychometric properties of these decontextualized tests (norm ref)
Sensitivity- correctly ID having a disorder
Specificity- correctly ID not having a disorder
Only 9 gave them these specificity and sensitivity reports in the manual
CELF-4
PLS-4
TEGI (test of early grammatical impairment)
TLC-E (test of language competence- expanded edit)
TNL
Spaulding EBP
EBP: general rule of thumb- a test should have a .8 or higher sensitivity and specificity, but our standard should be higher. 0.8 percent says that we are okay with being wrong 20% of the time- are we really okay with that?? No!
Purposes of info from a comprehensive assessment
Systematic observations: Provide insights that are unique to a specific child- support the development of IEP goals (specifically designed instruction)
School based data: Reflects comm skills in the most functional contexts of their day and documents the educational impact of the language deficit/limitation
SLP spec data: identify and describe a speech-language deficit (also: rule out language difference)
What should I do? Or How will you do? Or Why?
Processes will determine your specific actions
In other words: you have to know the principles of the assessment framework to guide your data gathering efforts!
