Page 79 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

Assessing What to Work on, Choosing Goals, and Taking Data

4. Assessing What to Work on,

Choosing Goals, and Taking Data

Our speech pathology team is very successful at treating and dismissing children even when they
come from different cultures or lower socio-economic brackets. If you were to ask us why, it is in
large part due to taking goal writing and progress monitoring very seriously. It makes sense at a

certain level, doesn’t it? If you are trying to fix a problem and you are working exactly on what is
broken, you have a high likelihood of success? Conversely, if you are working in a general area with
no way to measure results, how successful will you be? Despite this fact, many graduates come out
of their master’s programs lacking confidence in their ability to perform informal assessment, choose

goals, and effectively taking data. We want this section to change how you relate to goals, your data,
and the success of your caseload.

Are you off course?

Airplane flying provides a great
metaphor for us as we talk about goals

and collect data. An airplane that flies
one degree off course will miss its target by one mile for every 60 miles flown. This means that an
airplane leaving L.A. for New York with a 1 degree error will be 40 miles off course by the time it

gets to the East Coast. Would this be acceptable to you if you were on this airplane? Of course not!
Secondly, autopilot settings are needed to constantly make corrections as the plane flies along.
Micro-adjustments need to be made due to changes in wind-speed and the curvature of the earth.

Do you think that evaluating the progress of a student is valuable if it only happens every 12 months?

What we need is effective method to make sure that we are “on course” from the very beginning.
And because we are human and children mature, we need a way to check our progress along the way.

In this section, we will start by showing you an easy way to evaluate the narrative abilities of a child
so that you have a baseline. We will then talk about writing great goals and introduce you to an
online goal bank in English and Spanish from which you can choose goals. We will conclude by

talking about better ways to ensure good data collection.

Assessment of Fictional Narratives

Story-telling and our ability to understand a simple narrative are the building blocks of our
communication. When we are answering questions in school, recounting an event in our lives, or
explaining the steps in a process, we are telling a story. The person who is listening to us has

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