September 2002
Insights from Pearson Assessments Development
Tests Don't Diagnose . . .You Do! The Difference Between Testing and Assessment
What exactly do test, assessment, and diagnosis mean? And what impact do the use and understanding of these terms have on clinical decision-making?





July 2002
Insights from Pearson Assessments Development
Speech Assessment - How Deep Can You Go? (in no time at all)?
If speech development were easy, children wouldn't need speech-language pathologists. But easy it is not. Speech production uses a set of arbitrary sounds and sound combinations that are based on an equally arbitrary set of rules (Kent, 1998, in Bernthal & Bankson, 1998). Unfortunately, children don't always master these rules in the same way. Enter the need for speech assessment and time-consuming analysis and interpretation.





June 2002
Insights from Pearson Assessments Development
Test-Retest Reliability - The Good, the Bad, and the Judgement Calls
Overall, test-retest reliability is an index of temporal stability. It tells how much the individual's normative score might possibly change on retesting if a period of time has elapsed between test administrations…When making a decision on retesting, follow the steps below.





May 2002
Insights from Pearson Assessments Development
Articulation and Phonology Are Not Normally Distributed - Who Cares? You Do!
Since the publication of the GFTA-2, questions have been raised about the difference between scores on the 1986 edition of GFTA and the GFTA-2. The 1986 GFTA norms were percentiles extrapolated from two different databases: the National Speech and Hearing Survey (Hull, Mielke, Willeford, & Timmons, 1976) and the Khan and Lewis work of 1986. The use of two unrelated databases collected at two different points in time is part of the reason for score differences. However, the key reason for the difference in scores lies in how the normative scores were developed.