Speech-language pathologists rely on a number of tools to
complete comprehensive assessments of language abilities in school-age
children. Two types of tools are norm-referenced tests and criterion-referenced
tests. Norm-referenced tests assess broad language skill and allow clinicians
to determine the child’s level of ability by comparing his performance to
scores from a large sample of other children. In contrast, criterion-referenced
tests offer in-depth information about a smaller set of language skills, but
use more naturalistic tasks, such as recounting a narrative.
This study compared the performance of school-age children
on a variety of norm-referenced tests and narrative language samples. The
authors found that performance on the two types of assessments was more closely
related for younger children (6–8 years) than for older children (9–12 years).
The study also examined the extent to which the tests agreed on which children
where considered to be impaired. Agreement of identification rates between
different norm-referenced tests and different aspects of the narrative language
samples ranged from 37% to 77%. This showed that some children were identified
by both tests, while others were only identified by one type of test.
The authors conclude that age must be considered when
selecting criterion-referenced tests because different types of naturalistic
language tasks are more appropriate for different ages. They also suggest that
clinicians continue to use both types of testing in their assessments in order
to gather a wealth of information about each child’s language ability.
Blogger: Laura Pauls, MCISc-SLP
Blogger: Laura Pauls, MCISc-SLP
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