While traditionally many SLPs practiced only the pull-out service delivery model, this has been changing in recent years and the expectation that school SLPs provide services using the push-in model is increasingly common. In New York City, Chancellor of the Depart of Education, Dennis Walcott called for a push-in model to be used with students receiving related services. When I started working at a middle school in Brooklyn, I did not have any previous experiences providing services by pushing in. At the school placement I had done in graduate school, the SLP I worked with used the pull-out model. When I asked around for advice, I was hearing that a lot of SLPs wanted to provide push-in therapy and wanted to go into the classrooms but most did not know how to do it effectively. Read More
Category: Disability Evaluations
Understanding Assessment: Understanding the Normal Distribution
A normal distribution, also called a bell curve, occurs when variables (i.e., test scores) plotted on a graph fall into a regular distribution around a single mean. In a normal distribution, about 96% of the scores will fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean. Read More
Understanding Assessment: How Does Linguistic Bias Affect Language Evaluations?
Linguistic bias can be bias towards speakers of other languages or dialects, or towards bilingual speakers and results in inaccurate assessment of children from linguistic backgrounds other than Standard American English. As a result, minorities are overrepresented in special education programs (IDEA 2004). Read More
Understanding Assessment: Methods for Evaluating Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomic status (SES) affects cultural perspective and speech and language development and can be found in testing materials and the evaluator’s interpretation of assessment performance. Read More
Understanding Assessments: Reliability of Tests
Reliability is the degree of consistency of measurement in a test. A test has a high degree of reliability if it produces similar results consistently under similar conditions. Read More
Understanding Assessment: Understanding the Standard Error of Measure
The standard error of measure indicates the amount of uncertainty that a sample (such as a normative sample) is truly representative of the general population. In the case of administering standardized tests, it conveys the level of uncertainty that a single test performance observed by the evaluator represents how the child would do if it were administered multiple times. Read More
