Here is something I typed up for an administrator regarding Middle School Language Evaluations. It provides an adequate explanation of a few assessment tools I use and what they measure.
Middle School Language Evaluations
Tests Administered:
Below are the tests that I most use to assess students. On occasion other tests may be selected based on the specific information we are trying to derive.
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4th Edition (PPVT-4)
Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL)
Pragmatics Profile from the CELF-4
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4th Edition
The PPVT-4 is administered to assess a student’s single word receptive vocabulary. It requires the student to identify the correct word by touching the corresponding picture from a field of four. Scores between 85-115 fall within the average range.
Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL)
Subtests from the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) are administered to assess the student’s receptive and expressive oral language skills. These skills include comprehension, expression, and retrieval in four language structure categories, lexical/semantic, (i.e. understanding word meaning) syntactic, supralinguistic, and pragmatic (appropriate language use).
Five subtests are administered to assess the student’s spoken language. The subtests from the CASL have a standard score of 100 with a standard deviation of +/- 15; therefore scores between 85 – 115 are within the average range. The following table presents a brief description of each subtest, and the student’s standard scores in relation to the individual subtests.
If they are 13 years or older the core language test includes Synonyms, Grammaticality Judgment, Nonliteral Language, Meaning from Context, and Pragmatic Judgment.
If they are younger than 13 years the core language test includes Antonyms, Grammatical Morphemes, Sentence Comprehension, Nonliteral Language, and Pragmatic Judgment.
The following table presents a brief description of each subtest, and the student’s standard scores in relation to the individual subtests.
Subtest | Test Format | Standard Score | Interpretation |
Antonyms: measures child’s knowledge of words. | Child must provide a word that means the opposite of the presented word.
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Grammatical Morphemes: measures child’s knowledge and use of the form and meaning of grammatical morphemes. | Child is given instruction to complete an analogy to compare the grammatical relationship between the meanings of two words with a grammatical relationship between the meanings of a second pair of words. (Example: “GEOGRAPHY is to GEOGRAPHER as MUSIC is to ___”
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Sentence Comprehension: measures child’s word knowledge, retrieval, and oral expression in a linguistic context. | The clinician reads the child two sentences and asks whether the sentences have the same meaning or a different one.
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Grammaticality Judgment: measures child’s ability to make immediate judgments of grammatically of sentences and to correct those sentences that contain grammatical errors. | Child is given a sentence and must determine whether it is grammatically correct. If not, the child must correct the error so that the sentence is grammatically correct. (Example: “He couldn’t see none of his family at the game.”) |
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Meaning from Context: measures child’s inference ability to arrive at meaning of spoken text. (Therefore, their world knowledge is not required.) | The clinician reads the child a sentence that contains a word with which they are not familiar. The child must use clues within the sentence to derive the meaning of the word. (An example would be “The tour members tried to obtain the services of a cicerone at each of the museums they visited. Explain what cicerone means.”)
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Nonliteral Language: measures child’s comprehension of complex language whose meaning is not directly available from lexical or grammatical information. | The clinician reads the child a short sentence that contains a nonliteral expression. The clinician then asks the child what this expression means. |
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Pragmatic Judgment: measures awareness of appropriate language in a situational context and the ability to modify this language as necessary. | The clinician reads the child a scenario. The clinician asks the child what the appropriate language in this situation would be. |
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The student then receives an overall score. If it is lower than 85 they are in the below average range.
Supplementary Subtests
Based on testing scores I may add in additional subtests as needed. (They may be any of the ones mentioned above that were not part of the student’s core language). For example I may give a student older than 13 the Antonyms subtest in order to derive more information about the student’s vocabulary.
Below are additional subtests that are useful for understanding a student’s inferencing skills and are particularly useful for children with ASD to get a better grasp on their specific language difficulties.
Subtest | Test Format | Standard Score | Interpretation |
Idiomatic Language: measures child’s receptive knowledge of idioms. | Child must complete an idiomatic phrase. (Example: “Money always burns a hole in my…”) |
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Inference: measures child’s ability to problem-solve. | Child is read a short scenario. He must use the clues in the story to infer why a character performed a specific action or why they felt a certain way. (Example: “The builder had to change the size of the doorways in the basketball player’s house. Why?”) |
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Ambiguous Sentences: measures understanding of words that have more than one meaning and can be interpreted in more than one way. | The clinician reads the child a sentence to be interpreted by the student in two ways. (Example: “It’s too bad the glasses are broken.”) |
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From supplemental subtests I sometimes can derive Category Index scores. I am most likely to derive a Category Index for Supralinguistics which has to do with a student’s ability to comprehend complex language in which meaning is not directly available from lexical or grammatical information. This refers to a student’s inferencing abilities or ability to understand nonliteral language.
Pragmatics Profile from the CELF-4
The pragmatics profile is used to obtain information regarding a student’s development of verbal and nonverbal social communication skills and aspects of language use (Secord et. al, 197). The pragmatics profile is a 52-item checklist of speech intentions typically expected for social and school interactions. They are judged on a 4-point scale questionnaire that targets three areas:
1.) Rituals and Conversational Skills
2.) Asking For, Giving, and Responding to Information
3.) Nonverbal Communication Skills
This scale is completed by a staff member who is most familiar with the student's pragmatic abilities.
