Course Type: Video – 1 hour
ASHA Course Code: Service Delivery Associated with Speech, Language, Hearing and Related Disorders – 7010
In surveys and interviews, speech language pathologists reported taking 4-16 hours to complete an evaluation depending on their level of experience and the complexity of the situation. This is a ton of time when considering how many evaluations we all do in any given year.
We studied what contributed to the longer time frames and in this presentation will share seven solutions to specifically target tasks that are taking too long. From gathering information, organizing the referral documents, editing, proofing, and finding goals, there are several ways to reduce our report writing time. We will share free resources to address these issues. We end by presenting a solution we built, Evalubox, that combines all of these time-saving successes together.
Level, Authors, and Disclosures
FINANCIAL: Ellen Kester is the owner of Bilinguistics and she receives a salary. She also receives royalties from books and tests mentioned in the presentation. Scott Prath is employed at Bilinguistics and receives a salary. He also receives royalties from books and tests mentioned in the presentation.
NON-FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: None to disclose.
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Report writing is a well-documented pain point for speech-language pathologists. Most SLPs report that it takes FAR longer to analyze results and write a report than it does to do testing. We’ve analyzed why the process takes so long and have some solutions to address this.
We talked to a lot of speech language pathologists and there were a handful of report-writing problems that we heard over and over again. Often we use parent and teacher questionnaires that don’t ask the right questions. Some questions are unrelated to speech entirely. Others are not asked in a culturally sensitive way and we spend time re-wording things. After going through every parent and teacher questionnaire we could get our hands on, we culled the questions down to just the ones we need. Another was the imperfection of the Find and Replace process. If we spelled a child’s name wrong one time in the report, that name doesn’t get replaced, and oh is that painful. There’s also the issue of our system finding and replacing too many pronouns—not just the student’s pronouns but the teacher’s pronouns as well. And finally, we heard from SLPs that it takes a long time to organize the information from standardized and non-standardized testing into a single narrative, especially for children who speak more than one language. We’ll share organizational charts to make this process smoother.
Participants will be able to:
1. Pull information from standardized and non-standardized testing into an organizational chart that will facilitate the writing process.
2. Identify questions on their parent and teacher questionnaires that need to be eliminated or worded in a more culturally-sensitive way.
3. Develop a system for saving paragraphs about less-frequent speech and language disorders to facilitate report writing
4. Describe two important steps to take prior to the evaluation.
Time-Ordered Agenda
05 minutes Introduction
10 minutes Culturally Sensitive Parent and Teacher Questionnaires
30 minutes Tips and Forms for Faster Reports
15 minutes Case Study
