Research Corner

Emily’s PhD project is daunting, but intriguing. Recognizing the lack of appropriate tools available to evaluate word reading skills of bilingual children, she is developing an assessment tool that can be used to equitably evaluate the abilities of a diverse range of mono- and multilingual pre-school children in Canada and other countries with English as a societal language. Her idea is this: to create a clinically-informed quasi-universal dynamic assessment that can be used to evaluate word reading skills and predict future reading ability. This novel tool will be informed by outcomes of two studies: the first, a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the validity of dynamic assessments of word reading skills, and the second, a qualitative study exploring SLPs’ decision-making in bilingual language and literacy assessment.

The systematic review and meta-analysis (recently submitted for publication) examined the concurrent validity of dynamic assessments of word reading skills of phonological awareness, decoding and the alphabetic principle, with static assessments of equivalent constructs. Results suggest that dynamic assessments of word reading skills demonstrated strong concurrent and predictive validity overall, and for both monolingual and bilingual children. Although Emily cautioned that the multilingual children studied were generally either typically developing or not well-described whereas the monolingual children were more heterogeneous, these preliminary findings supported the idea that dynamic assessments are valid to use for word reading assessment. Additionally, assessments were only done in the societal language so language effects could not be controlled for, which was especially pertinent for the second-language speakers tested. A sub-analysis of the data found that of three pre-literacy skills tested (decoding, phonological awareness, and the alphabetic principle as measured by sound-symbol association), phonological awareness and decoding had the strongest concurrent and predictive validity. A secondary review and meta-analysis is currently underway. Outcomes will provide insight into the predictive validity of the two most common dynamic assessment formats used (graduated prompting versus test, teach, re-test) and their administration methods (virtual and in-person). When finalised, results will inform the design of the novel assessment tool.

The second study is currently on-going and is also innovative; building on previous studies that have found that static assessments normed on English-speaking monolingual children are preferred by SLPs over dynamic assessments or other evidence-based alternatives for evaluating language and literacy skills of multilingual children. This study explores how and why clinicians make these decisions. Through interviews, Emily hopes to discover which barriers are preventing SLPs from using dynamic assessment tools, and what the research community can do to better design assessments and communicate about the validity of their assessments for the target populations. 

Centred on the results of this research, Emily will next develop what she has tentatively named the QUDA (Quasi-Universal Dynamic Assessment). This tool will be dynamic in nature, meaning feedback and prompting will be incorporated into testing. This type of assessment evaluates the ability to learn word reading skills like phonological awareness and decoding rather than a child’s acquired knowledge. The tool will also reduce language effects by using symbols and non-words rather than English letters and test items. Non-words will be as universal as possible, using phonemes and word shapes that are common to most languages. Feedback in testing will be non-linguistic, such as icons of faces with different expressions. The tool may be administered in-person or virtually, depending on the results from her second review. Assessment of English monolingual, Mandarin-English bilingual, and Spanish-English bilingual preschool children using the tool will follow, and results will be compared with those of traditional English static pre-literacy assessments of equivalent constructs.

As SLPs continue to look for assessment and intervention tools that will better suit the needs of Canada’s diverse population, it is exciting and heartwarming to meet creative researchers who are committed to meeting this need. Thank you to Emily and all those at BAM! Toronto for your dedication to these research goals.