Data Collection for Stuttering Treatment

Question

Answer

I like to collect data in 5-minute spurts. During a session with a student, I will take 5 or 10 minutes and explain a stuttering technique.  I will talk about the technique while we talk about our day, etc.  We will talk about when we use this particular technique.  I am modeling the technique the whole time, and then we sit down and play a board game.  For 5 minutes, during the game, I count every time I hear him use easy onset or every time I hear him do a cancellation or pullout.  For those 5 minutes, I am really concentrating on some data driven things while we are playing a board game. Then we return to our unstructured activity.  I rotate between 10-minute and 5-minute sessions of structured and nonstructured tasks.  You can be flexible, just make sure that when you are collecting data that you collect it naturally. I collect my data during a board game and this is a more natural activity.  I am not seeing how many times he can repeat after me.  These are school-aged children and they are fluent in more clinical settings.  They are going to learn quickly how to become fluent.  

Megan Scott Dacus will earn her Ph.D. from the Arkansas Consortium for the Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders in 2013.  Her area of research is specific to pediatric fluency disorders.  Her primary interests are temperament/personality characteristics of children who stutter in the identification of subtypes of stuttering and contributing factors to disfluency within this population.