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|---|---|
| Topics | |
| Duration | |
| Credit | |
| Instructional Level and Content Area |
Effectively Evaluating Young Children
$15.00
1 hour
Course Type: PowerPoint Video
Join us as we discuss the limits and benefits of formal testing and learn how to effectively evaluate young children. We use examples of many evaluation tools (HELP, CELF, PLS, BDI) to show how to evaluate test items for bias. Improve your clinical judgment an increase your confidence in diagnosing this population.
I found the detailed item analysis extremely useful, thought-provoking, and right to the point. We need more SLPs to critically analyze the limited pool of tools at our disposal, think outside the box, and utilize their skills to more effectively evaluate and more confidently diagnose, or not. I think that too many clinicians rely too heavily on standardized assessment tools and too little attention on those things that are not so easily quantified, e.g., narrative language development, procedural discourse, pragmatics…the list goes on. Once again, thank you for the opportunity. Ivan Mejia, Bilingual SLP – Houston TX.
Participants will be able to:
- Explain how to effectively test young children using formal and informal measures
- Describe the appropriate use of test norms
- Identify how language differences affect test results
- Describe how cultural differences can influence test results
- Describe methods for supplemental or alternative assessments
Testing of young children is made complicated by the following issues:
- There are a limited number of formal tests yet EI professionals often have to (re) evaluate every 6 months which creates learning bias if the same test is used.
- Few tests exist in languages other than English.
- Many tests that do exist in a different language wrongfully refer to the English norms.
- Young children produce limited speech so standardized measures don’t typically incorporate measures of intelligibility.
Join us as we discuss the limits and benefits of formal testing and learn how to effectively evaluate young children. We use examples of many evaluation tools (HELP, CELF, PLS, BDI) to show how to evaluate test items for bias. Improve your clinical judgment and increase your confidence in diagnosing this population.
When a test is translated, the psychometric properties of it change. An item’s difficulty level (p-value) varies across language versions because of differences in the structure of the original and translated language. Items can also vary as a result of cultural differences. The influence of cultural and linguistic diversity on specific items from the Communication domain will be evaluated and discussed to enhance clinical judgment. In some assessment situations, a diagnostic decision will be straight forward. In other situations, alternative and supplemental assessment methods will be necessary for determination of eligibility.
All early childhood programs in Texas are using the Battelle Developmental Inventory-2 for determining eligibility. Although there is a Spanish Edition, evaluators are referred to the English norms. We will use the BDI-2 as a casestudy to describe how to use formal and informal measures to produce accurate results.
