The decision-making process in child language assessment.
The task of assessing a child's language for the purpose of intervention requires the ability to interpret information from a variety of sources. Knowing how that information is to be used during therapy plays an important part in deciding what type of information needs to be collected and how it will be interpreted. There needs to be a plan that will assist the speech therapist in analysing and interpreting most of the data that would be needed when making therapy-related diagnostic statements. A systems approach offers concepts and methods for devising a plan which will outline the necessary decisions. The purpose of this paper is to present, in a flow chart, the questions that need to be asked in the process of assessing a child's language development for the purpose of intervention; to indicate the type of information that would be needed to answer the questions; to state how the information would be interpreted; to suggest the type of tools that would be needed to collect this information; and to outline how the information can be presented so that a greater quantity of data can be summarised and interpreted in a systematic manner.
Gerard
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KA
World's End Health Centre, London.
Carson
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ER
D002648:Child; D003657:Decision Making; D003663:Decision Trees; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D013066:Speech-Language Pathology / Q000379:methods