So with all that in mind, today I'm going to highlight and discuss my favorite ways to assess our students that don't involve standardized tests. There are certainly some valid standardized tests, and I always include at least one standardized measure when I write my reports, but more often than not, I feel like standardized tests don't paint an accurate picture of my teens with speech and language needs.
**I won't be discussing fluency assessment here since I devoted an entire post to that!**
Classroom Observation
When I look back at my students' files and read their last SLP report, I am stunned to find that there is frequently a lack of any classroom observation! Maybe classroom observations aren't as common practice as I had assumed them to be, but I highly encourage you to get in the classroom and check out your student's behavior in their true learning environment (if you don't already do so)!To help guide my observations and create official notes that can be put in the student's file (I used to just scribble on scratch paper... not exactly file worthy!), I created a student observation form. Using this form helps to ensure that I don't forget to look for anything and that when writing the report I can easily find organized examples of student behavior that otherwise might be buried in a scribble of random notes.
I can't underscore the importance of classroom observations enough; I have been surprised by student behavior in several ways - sometimes I see them using great strategies (e.g. repeating key words to themselves) and sometimes I discover that their disruptive classroom behaviors are much worse than anyone was telling me! In the end, I always learn something new about my students that I otherwise would have never known.
Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment by Michelle-Garcia Winner
OK, so you didn't hear it from me, but you can find a .pdf of this tool on the internet for free by simply googling it. Hopefully you're all aware of Social Thinking and Michelle Garcia-Winner's awesome books, materials and products! But you may not be aware that buried within the Thinking About You Thinking About Me book is a full assessment tool designed to identify strengths and weaknesses for students on the autism spectrum.
With my high schoolers, I tend to employ the following sections:
Section 2. Questionnaire for Teachers and Related Service Professionals
- I distruibute this to all my student's classroom teachers by turning it into a .pdf to e-mail out
Section 3. Writing Sample: Asking for Help
- I may not do this section with the highest functioning students, but it can be eye-opening to see that some students don't even know their address and don't know how to ask for help!
Section 4. The Double Interview
- This is the bread and butter of this assessment. It examines student responses to questions and how well they are then able to interview you. It's also pretty interesting to discover that your students may be unable to identify you in a picture and may be unable to make guesses about who is with you in the pictures. I once had a student guess that my mother was my sister or friend (and not to insult my mother, but this was obviously not the case!). So much good info can be gathered from this.
Section 5. Thinking with Our Eyes
- Again, I likely would not complete this section with the highest functioning of students, but I have been surprised before by students I assumed would ace this section... and did not. Being unable to follow along with eye gaze can be detrimental to student success in the classroom and this portion can identify real weaknesses in this area.
Section 6. Sequencing Pictures
- The recommended series of pictures is expensive and I haven't found a really good cheap/free alternative. This section is interesting, but I don't find it as informative as the other sections. Some of the scenarios are legitimately very complicated and I don't blame students for having a difficult time sequencing them!
Section 7. Social Scenario Pictures
- I tend not to use the pictures recommended by MGW for this section because they're very outdated and it's not always easy to decipher what's going on. But since this is a dynamic, non-standardized assessment, you can use whatever you want! This .pdf has some great pictures if you don't have the funds to shell out $$$ for the official deck. Sometimes students surprise me by doing really well on this section - which only proves that they understand the concept but are having trouble generalizing.
I tend not to get into Section 8, because generally this is the realm of the RSP or SDC teacher and I don't want to step on any toes. However, if for some reason I was the sole provider for a student with autism, I would definitely complete this section to gain an idea about the student's organization in class.
Overall, it's a fantastic tool that can provide you with an overabundance of good information about your student's ability to perspective take, engage in conversation, follow social cues, and decipher non-verbal information.
Wordless Picture Books - Narrative Language Samples
I start by telling the student that we're going to look at a book without words. I let them know that we're going to look at it together first, but that after I want them to tell their own version. Together we thumb through each page of the book and while I don't tell my own story, I highlight some vocabulary I might want them to use (e.g. "Look at how they're floating," "They've really built up some momentum!" After we've looked at each page together, I turn on my recording device and ask the student to use the book to tell their own version of the story. Note that this is different from elementary re-tells where you would model the story first. By high school, we would expect students to generate a simple story using pictures all on their own, right?
I'm looking for vocabulary choices, complexity of sentences, and overall cohesion of the story. Did it make sense? Did they skip over something and tell a confusing narrative? Did they employ any of the words I modeled minutes earlier? Were their utterances short and concise or did they launch into detailed explanations? I take this narrative language sample and transcribe it so I can use it in...
SALT: Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts - Expository Language Samples
Not at all!!
You can very easily and quickly use language analysis to gain great insight into your teenage students' language performance! And with SALT, you can compare your students' samples to a large sample group and make comparison between their performance and a standardized performance. I was under the impression that all graduate programs were teaching language analysis via SALT nowadays, but after talking to my district's new CFs a few weeks ago, I learned that no... not everyone is teaching SALT! So here we are; if SALT is new to you, please check it out. There's a handy introductory video in a series of instructional videos on their website to help you get started here!
I currently have the 2008 version of SALT; the only downside of this version is that the Expository Database only extends to age 15;6, not beautiful and amazing age 18;9 that the latest SALT version encompasses. If you're new to SALT and work with teens, I highly recommend springing for the new version for this reason alone (There's also a Persuasion database for teens included in the new version, I wish I knew more about it!). The Expository Database works on the premise of eliciting an expository sample through explanation a sport or game and use of a graphic organizer to sequence thoughts. This official SALT publication goes into way more details about the process! You can then code the sample to look at the nitty-gritty of grammatical errors, TTR, etc. But you can also score the explanation holistically based off of this scoring system and then compare the holistic scores to the standardization sample.
You can code the narrative sample I outlined previously and run it through SALT as well! As of now, there is no standardized sample for narrative samples for teenagers, but you can always compare a student's performance to their expository sample or code for anything your heart desires. For example, you can enter a different code every time a student uses a coordinating clause or a subjunctive clause and then run an analysis to get a percentage of how frequently they use different grammatical forms. You can also make up your own codes to mark every time a phoneme is distorted, you can code for all types of dysfluencies, and an intelligibility percentage is automatically calculated for you as long as you mark "X" every time a word was unintelligible. You can also code for pragmatic discrepancies, such as every time a student makes an off-topic comment, physically turns away from you, laughs inappropriately - the list goes on! Language sample analysis is truly a tool that you can use with all your students!
Getting an expository sample and/or a narrative sample from my students can reveal some strengths and weaknesses I would not have otherwise seen in standardized tests. For example, I have students who bomb the Formulated Sentences section of the CELF-5 and then use those target words correctly in their explanations. We have to be willing to accept that many of our students have a lack of exposure to the material being tested, are simply bad test takers, are bilingual, or have a whole host of other cultural or dialectical differences that make them poor candidates for standardized measures.
SALT is not complicated to learn; I had the benefit of being forced to learn it in graduate school, but I recently trained my SLPA in a matter of about 2 hours. She now codes my language samples for me so the hard work is done ahead of time and all I have do is click a few times to run the analysis and the write the results into my report!
And furthermore, if research is more your game, I encourage you to check out this article about use of SALT with bilingual students and this "myth-busting" article to ease any potential apprehension. SALT is ASHA-approved and makes for a very legally defensible assessment tool. Want to make the deal even sweeter? SALT offers ASHA-approved free CEU courses to help incentivize learning how to code your language samples!! Let's get coding!
Functional Communication Profile for Moderate/Severe Students
Perhaps you've heard of it before; I'm a big fan of the Functional Communication Profile - Revised. It's a very thorough tool that helps guide assessment of students with complex needs in the areas of sensory/motor, attentiveness, receptive/expressive language, pragmatics, speech, voice, fluency, oral, and non-oral communication skills. It allows you to use direct testing, observation, or informant report as means to document a student's performance - something I've found invaluable when completing Non-Public School assessments on students I have never met before. my one-time assessment is likely not a very accurate picture of their daily performance so teacher and staff report is extremely valuable in gaining a better picture of their performance.
I tend to supplement my FCP-R findings with examples of direct utterances from the student and/or descriptive examples of how they get their wants and needs met. In my classroom observation section, I might detail how AAC or visual modifications are used in the classroom to facilitate communication. Since these students often have very complex communication needs, the more description the better! I have also been known to administer the EOW and/or ROW solely as positive evidence that these students are able to store and access some academic vocabulary (e.g. erupt, diamond, letter, number, etc), even if their standard score is, as expected, abysmal. I've also used the stimuli informally to elicit things like following directions, knowledge of basic concepts, etc.
I recently attended a professional development where the Pragmatics Profile, a free assessment tool, was discussed. It seems highly appropriate for teenage Mod/Severe students, but I have yet to use it. Are you familiar with this assessment? Please comment and share your experiences if you've used this tool before, I'm very interested in knowing more!
Student Interview and Teacher Input
Like with classroom observations, I've read a lot of previous reports lately where there was no information from the student themselves or from their teachers. Teacher input can be hard to get, I know, which is why I adapted my teacher input forms into .pdfs for easy completion by e-mail. But in reality, many teachers never return my forms by e-mail, so in my reports I often write down their concerns about the student that I gathered from a quick chat with them in between classes, at a staff meeting, or when I see them in the parking lot.
Hopefully this post has given you a few new ideas to spice up your assessment process and include some measures that get out of the box of standardized tests. I know how easy it is to administer the CELF and the GFTA and be done with it, but we really do our students a disservice when we focus on test scores and ignore the holistic picture. These measures are also helpful for moving students off your caseload who no-longer benefit from services. Even if they bomb the CELF-5, a solid expository sample, narrative sample, classroom observation, and teacher report can be your evidence as to why they no longer qualify. Please share your experiences and expertise with authentic assessment in the comments!
And as always, it doesn't have to be fancy, just keep it fun and functional!
- Jillian, the No-Frills SLP
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