Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Language Assessment for Children with Language-related Special Education Needs

Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Language Assessment for Children with Language-related Special Education Needs

Project Team
Diane Williams, Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
Carol Miller, Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders

Project Funding
SSRI Level 2

Project Description

This innovative project will document how spoken and written language difficulties are manifested in the lived experiences of people with neurodevelopmental disabilities, their families, and their service providers. Our long-term goal is to create an assessment procedure that is relevant, actionable, and strengths-based. In order to create this rigorous, evidence-based assessment, we must understand what stakeholders need to make the assessment process meaningful and useful. We will use an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. First, we will conduct interviews (n = 16) with key stakeholder groups. The results of the interviews will be used to build a survey to collect data from a larger sample of participants (n ~ 100) representing the same groups. The findings of the proposed project will be used in the preparation of a proposal for external funding to create and validate a quantitative assessment.