Source URL: View this document at the National Education Policy Center
This article describes a framework for schools and other educational institutions to follow in order to begin to implement RTI with their own students.
Category: Relevant Research
Relevant Research: Eligibility Criteria for Language Impairment: Is the Low End of Normal Always Appropriate?
Source URL: View this document on the ASHA website
Many clinicians label a child as language impaired (LI) or typically developing (TD) based on arbitrary cutoff scores (1.5 SD below the mean or 1 SD below the mean) on standardized tests. However, as demonstrated in this article, many standardized tests do not even provide information about validity and reliability.
Relevant Research: Task Familiarity: Effects on the Test Performance of Puerto Rican and African American Children
Source URL: View this document on the ASHA website
This study illustrates how important it is for an evaluator to be familiar with both the typical language practices of the communities they work in as well as the bias inherent in many of the standardized tests that are used to determine disability.
Relevant Research: Grammatical Morphology in Children Learning English as a Second Language: Implications of Similarities with Specific Language Impairment
Source URL: View this article on PubMed
This study provided evidence that typically developing children acquiring English exhibit errors on standardized tests that are similar to the performance of monolingual children with specific language impairment.
Relevant Research: Past Tense Marking by African American English-Speaking Children Reared in Poverty AND Passive Participle Marking by African American English-Speaking Children Reared in Poverty
Source URL: View this document on the ASHA website
These studies represent more evidence against the use of standardized tests when assessing the linguistic abilities of culturally or linguistically diverse (CLD) children.
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Relevant Research: Measuring Bilingual Children’s Receptive Vocabularies
Source URL: View this document on PubMed
This study investigated the performance of typically developing, bilingual Spanish-English speaking first graders on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. It showed that examining only one of a bilingual child’s languages does not provide an accurate representation of the child’s linguistic knowledge.
Relevant Research: Identifiers of Predominantly Spanish-Speaking Children with Language Impairment
Source URL: View this document on the ASHA website
This study proved that measures other than standardized language assessments can more accurately identify language impairment in culturally and linguistically diverse children (in this case monolingual Spanish speakers). Read More
Relevant Research: A Preliminary Examination of Vocabulary and Word Learning in African American Toddlers From Middle and Low Socioeconomic Status Homes
Source URL: View this document on the ASHA website
This study added to the growing body of literature demonstrating a correlation between socioeconomic status and performance on standardized vocabulary tests. Standardized vocabulary tests were not found to have an acceptable level of accuracy in diagnosing the presence of a language impairment. Read More
