Question
How do you measure a social objective or an affective objective for stuttering treatment so you have concrete data for your IEPs?
Answer
Let me address the affective area first, because I think that is one of the easier ones. There is a standardized assessment called the Communication Attitudes Test by Brutten and Vanryckeghem that measures attitudes of children who stutter. One of the things you could do is give the child or the student that measure at the beginning of the school year, work on attitudes and emotions and communicative apprehension that is addressed in that assessment, and then administer it again either half way through the year or at the annual review.
For the social area, it is more difficult to measure unless you have very specific things that you are going to address pre-therapy and post-therapy. In the assessment that I have created (the CALMS), not that you would have to get that, I have statements such as “I feel comfortable stuttering on the playground” or “I stutter on the playground.” I look at this, not as a yes or no issue, but from a perspective of how often it might occur. I have a 1 to 5 scale of how often something occurs in a particular social setting. You could measure how often they talk to children in the lunchroom. How often do they interact with children on the playground and how much do they stutter? How often do they avoid raising their hand in class? You could show through a rating scale, that initially the child may say they never raised their hand or they always avoid raising their hand. Now they avoid only sometimes. Maybe they would give it a 3 instead of a 5. That is how I would measure some social aspects.
E. Charles Healey is a professor of speech-language pathology at the University of Nebraska for the past 35 years. He is an ASHA Fellow, an ASHA Board Certified Specialist in Fluency Disorders and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Fluency Disorders. Dr. Healey is the author of the CALMS Assessment for School-Age Children Who Stutter.
