Kathleen T. Williams, PhD, NCSP, (pictured at left) discussed vocabulary assessment, intervention, and how to measure progress. She also gave some examples from the PPVT-4 and EVT-2. You can watch the recording below. You can download the slides right here.
Did you attend the webinar? Follow it on Twitter? What did you think? Let us know in the comments or maybe even email Dr. Williams directly!
If you attended the webinar but did not receive an email with instructions for getting CE credit, pleaselet us know.
If you can’t stand the heat, get inside. Luckily, the 119 degree heat in Las Vegas at the ASHA Schools conference in mid-July kept people indoors and for many, at a session on school-age stuttering by Nina Reeves, MS, CCC-SLP, BRS-FD. If you look at the ASHA data, most SLPs see children who stutter, but not very many in number. So it seems that continuing education on stuttering assessment and intervention is especially critical to maintain a high standard of evidence-based practice and confidence in this part of the SLP scope of practice. Nina’s presentation did just that…with plenty of great energy and passion on behalf of children who stutter.
Two (of many) key insights from Nina’s presentation:
Look beyond the stutter—As we all know, while frequency counts and descriptions of stuttering are important, they are not the whole story. In addition, children who continue to stutter well into elementary school and beyond often have long-term effects of stuttering in their lives. In ongoing assessment and intervention, Nina emphasized the cognitive/affective and environmental aspects of the child’s life as they address their own stuttering. The literature on any chronic communication disorder may be a good area of ongoing reading for even more insights into our role as SLPs and supportive guides to children who stutter.
Jump in yourself—If you want to teach a technique to someone who stutters, you’d better be willing to demonstrate both the technique AND the stuttering event with them. Trust and authenticity is paramount in any therapeutic partnership; stuttering assessment/intervention is no different. Nina encouraged all of us who work with children who stutter to take our turn and learn to pseudo-stutter with our students in the same contexts that they do. Scary? Sure. But just imagine being someone who stutters—not able to turn stuttering “off.”
One final thought: if you’re looking for an assessment tool that measures “beyond the stutter,” check out our soon-to-publish record forms for ages 7-17 of the OASES: Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering by J. Scott Yaruss, Robert Quesal, and Craig Coleman. In just 10-15 minutes, your student who stutters can complete a self-report of the impact stuttering has on his or her life across contexts. While the frequency of stuttering may not change much over time, the OASES can give you a quantifiable measure of progress (i.e., an impact score) that the impact of stuttering is going down.
Have your own story about stuttering assessment and intervention? Share it below!
At the end of June (National Aphasia Awareness Month), we caught up with Nancy Helm-Estabrooks, Sc.D, author of the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT). We talked about aphasia, the CLQT, and how she got into the field.
June is National Aphasia Awareness Month. In that spirit, we’ve been thinking about quick tips for you related to aphasia assessment and treatment. Most of us who have worked clinically in the area of aphasia likely would agree that a combination of formal and informal assessment procedures balances an approach to assessment at any stage. Of course, when the patient or client is in the acute phase of a neurological event, brevity is a partner to a broad survey of communication skills.
Enter the Bedside Record Form (BRF) of the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R). In just 15 minutes or less, you can get a broad survey of typically assessed language skills with a few items in each area. That’s the formal part of the evaluation—listening, speaking, reading, writing, and apraxia, in a quick, standardized nutshell.
Then, consider using some of the tasks (or similar tasks) dynamically. In just seconds, you can informally assess “what works” in terms of viable communication strategies beyond the formal procedure. Tools required? Blank paper and Sharpies. Here’s an example: The patient scores 0 on the Spontaneous Speech: Content section of the BRF. After you complete the administration, you might say to the patient, “Let’s try this again.” Readminister the same four items from that section, but offer written choices you’ve created with your Sharpie and paper. Read through each of the choices aloud, pointing as you go, and then hand the Sharpie to the patient. What happens next may surprise you! Picture drawing, pointing to written choices, gesturing—all are viable dynamic options to follow a quick, formal assessment.
You’ve done it! Report the score from the WAB-R’s BRF; describe options for communication success where the difficult skills appear for the patient, caregivers, and medical staff.
So, do you have a tip for assessing or treating a person with aphasia? Share it with everyone in the comments below.
“I have a question about the Following Directions subtest of the CELF-4. Last year I was reassessing a student and during the FD subtest my gut told me he was doing MUCH better than the year before and had made great improvements. I also felt that he was probably age appropriate or possibly mildly delayed, based on his performance. When I scored him and checked the norms, he came out as only a SS of 4 and I was shocked that he could have done that poorly. I rarely look up age equivalents, since they are problematic, but checked and his score described him as 8:2. He was 9:0 with a raw score of 41. This did not follow, as performing similarly to an 8 year-old didn’t seem all that bad for a just-turned 9 year-old (certainly not severely delayed).
I did some more checking and have concerns about the ‘age leap’ norms for Following Directions just at the 9 year-old level. I realize that you are suddenly giving a 23 point credit to 9 year-olds that the 8 year-olds don’t get, but even if my student had made an error on 9 of the 23 items a week before I had tested him, when he was still 8:11, he would have come out as a SS of 7; a rather large difference from a SS of 4! The difference between low average-mild and severely delayed is rather stark. I did give him the first part, for goal writing purposes, and he made errors on 4 of the first 23 items.
I am wondering if there is a normative data mistake or problem in the jump from 5-8 and 9-21 for FD? Is there an explanation for what happened with my student?”
Elisabeth H. Wiig, PhD
Dr. Wiig’s Answer:
You are indeed correct when you noted that there is a large bump in scores at age 9. The same raw score at age 8 would result in a standard score of 9-10 and at age 9 the same raw score is a standard score of 4. To perform in the average range at age 8, the student would have had to receive a raw score 46 or higher (5-7 additional raw score points.) When you look at the raw score means in Table 6.12 in the Examiner’s Manual, you’ll see that there was a big jump in the mean performance for the children in the standardization sample on the this subtest between ages 5:0 and 5:6 (6 standard score points), 6:0 and 6:6 (5 standard score points), 6:6 to 7:0 (5 standard scores points) and ages 8 and 9 (a 7 point jump). Improvement in these skills levels off after that. The norms for age 9 include children from 9 years, 0 months, 0 days to 9 years 11 months, 30 days. When you test a student who is at the very bottom of an age range, you are comparing that child to children who are mostly older than he or she is, and there is obviously a great deal of growth that occurs at this pivotal age.
Here are some of the links we found particularly interesting this week… Ok. From the last few weeks, since we haven’t posted Weekly Links since mid-May.
General:
ASHA Member, Landria Seals, submitted a show idea for Oprah’s new network, but she needs votes and views to be selected. You can watch her audition video here.
Here are the final two “Express Yourself” posters for Better Hearing and Speech Month. Let us know in the comments below, or over on our Facebook page if these are helpful!
Creative Commons Attribution: "Childhood Artist" by Wyoming_Jackrabbit
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To celebrate Better Hearing and Speech Month, we’ve created four free “Express Yourself” posters. Click the images below to download the PDFs. Here are the first two:
