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What originally motivated your work in basic concept assessment?

Answer:

I began to think about basic concepts many years ago when I was a teacher of young children and working on my doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. I became interested in why some children had difficulty following directions such as “Mark all of the words in the top row that begin with the letter g.” As I reviewed curricular materials in reading and mathematics, the relational words stood out.

The use of many of these words was not directly taught at that time. So, for many children there was a hidden curriculum that was needed for success in school. The development of children’s understanding of what I refer to as “basic concepts” became the basis of my doctoral dissertation, the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts, and continues to be an area of importance in my life’s work.

The current version, the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts-3 (BTBC-3), continues to be a planning and problem-solving tool for teachers, speech-language pathologists, and other professionals. It samples a student’s understanding of a large number of essential basic relational concepts—such as before and after—that are important to reading, mathematics and science, following directions, solving problems, and taking other tests. The goal of the BTBC-3 is to identify basic concepts of space, quantity and time that children are familiar with or may be emerging in order to guide instruction at school and at home.

I will be presenting two upcoming webinars that focus on basic concepts and hope that you will attend:

April 2, 2013: Basic Concept Assessment/Intervention: Building Blocks to School Success
Explores basic concept assessment-intervention planning using a multiple-step model. Presents evidence based intervention concerns along with checklists to monitor students’ use of concepts across different contexts and as tools of thinking.

April 23, 2013: The Critical Role of Following Directions in the Classroom and at Home
Explores the role of basic concepts in directions that children hear at home and at school along with strategies to improve children’s ability to follow different kinds of directions