Data: an essential ingredient in therapy

Data is a very important part of doing speech and language therapy.  We need to have evidence that what we are doing is having an impact. It assists us in knowing what the next steps will be.

American Speech and Hearing Association ( ASHA) in the an article on the roles and responsibilities of school-based speech and language pathologist states:  “Data Collection and Analysis — SLPs, like all educators, are accountable for student outcomes. Therefore, data-based decision making, including gathering and interpreting data with individual students, as well as overall program evaluation are essential responsibilities.” http://www.asha.org/policy/PI2010-00317/

I know that I personally constantly look at the way that I am taking data for my students and redesigning it both to match the goals for the student but also to streamline the process. Data is only as good as the information that you put in to it.

Looking at other people’s data collections can assist you in designing your own.  At school this year I have used address labels to keep track of my lesson plans.  I post them on the child’s folder so it is easy to quickly do the session plans for a group of students. I have the students develop goals which are based on their IEP goals and we create a ‘ picture reward’ of it.  When they have done the goal three times they take the picture home. It therefor is used as an incentive for the child, communication to the parent and data for me. A sample of this might be a child chooses a picture of a puppy from Google images, I  write the goal for example ” Pauly will be able to write a sentence with a prepositional phrase . When he does this for three sessions he takes the picture home’.

I use an app to take data for my articulation cases.

Here are some other examples that graduate students have developed for their data collections.

Here you can see the words, the opportunities and the percentage.  The other terrific thing about this data chart is that you can see that the child had plenty of opportunity to get practice with the targetted sound.  This is very important because sometimes you might plan a great activity but there is more concentration on the activity rather than the skill being worked on.

Here is another chart a student did that demonstrates the differences in production at different levels.

Data:

 Observations/Behaviors:

Tongue Tip in Sentences: was (x2), berries, most, antlers

Tongue Tip Reading Story: sentence, forest, berries, was

Data Chart for a child with apraxia:

Data:

See how the clinician measured the three times the child said the word and put in the error words.

Here is a student that is measuring conversation skills and she has the language sample as the data collection.

Data: