Free learning difficulties screener
11 RepliesFor my sins, I’m now the President of SPELD-Victoria, our state’s peak not-for-profit organisation for people with learning difficulties. We met yesterday to talk about the next strategic plan (Melbourne in July, a good time to be indoors).
One topic we touched on was the cost of assessment for kids with learning difficulties. Unless it is provided by the school/education department, an educational assessment by a psychologist costs $1500+. Parents often don’t know whether this is necessary, or if it is, how much/what type of assessment to request. Screening for learning difficulties isn’t yet done consistently in schools. Some online screening tools cost $200+ (!!), and take a while to provide a report. Gah.
Happily, AUSPELD (the peak body for the state-based SPELDs) has a free online screener for learning difficulties.
I just tried it out, using an imaginary upper primary student with significant writing/spelling difficulties and a family history of learning difficulties, who I named “test” (so the good folk at AUSPELD know it’s not a real person).
It took a couple of minutes to complete, and here are screenshots of the report I was emailed straight away:
For a fast, computer-generated report for the imaginary child I had in mind, I thought this was fairly well-targeted, informative and helpful. The links in the report screenshots above aren’t active, but the links below are:
- AUSPELD bookshop (which also has Pam Snow and Caroline Bowen’s new book “Evidence-based support for children and young people with additional needs“, ask your local library to get a copy).
I didn’t take screenshots of the logos, addresses, phone numbers etc of the state-based SPELDs which were at the bottom of the report, but they’re in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia as well as Victoria.
Unfortunately, the Victorian SPELD waiting list for assessment is months long, not sure about other states. SPELD Vic staff are still in temporary accommodation following a building fire, but finding permanent premises (know somewhere great? tell us!) and hiring more psychologists are in the plan.
If you’re in Melbourne and want a briefer, more affordable assessment of phonological processing, word-level reading and spelling with a report and recommendations (but not a full Specific Learning Disorder diagnostic report), our waiting list at Spelfabet is currently weeks not months. We can also assess speech and language. Click here to make a referral.
Please encourage relevant people/schools to use AUSPELD’s free learning difficulties screening tool.
Alison Clarke
Speech Pathologist
11 responses to “Free learning difficulties screener”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Hi
I think you are amazing and deserve a medal.
Thank you for all you have done for struggling readers.
A grateful kiwi teacher
Hi Rosalie, to my surprise I actually got a medal, in the last of the Order of Australia Medals issued before Queen Elizabeth died, so that was very nice and I really don’t need another one. Thank YOU for the lovely feedback, though. It’s cold and rainy here and I have a cold so you’ve made my day. All the best, Alison
Thank you, Alison, for your excellent work and detailed information. Congratulations on your new role !
Thanks, Meredith, though it’s an unpaid, extra role and my friends were all saying “I thought you were going to slow down and have more of a life”. But I really really want us to have an excellent SPELD here in Victoria, it has been through quite a downturn and Mandy Nayton from AUSPELD/DSF has come in and helped pull it out of that and get it back on track. Since she has been putting so much unpaid time and effort into it, and she’s theoretically supposed to be closer to retirement than I am and lives in Perth, I think some of us locals should also step up and assist, and let her know we aren’t going to let it fall in a hole again. All the best, Alison
As above
Hi Alison, I’m curious how this helps with the process of diagnosis since it is a screening test only? Would this help prioritise a child who may have more significant difficulties in a waitlist situation? Useful for me anyway since I usually am assessing speech and language and then start doing therapy and hear that my client doesn’t like reading/spelling/writing (or all of them!) and this will help to identify if it’s learning difficulty related or more exposure/experience related 🙂
I think it’s just meant to help people think through whether to refer and pay for a formal assessment, it’s not a robust statistical tool but for people who aren’t sure where to start it provides some useful information and ideas. It’s not a substitute for a robust, statistically valid and reliable test, as I’m sure you know.
I think for too long we have treated language and literacy as different Things, but in school age kids they are completely intertwined and we should stop doing that. We just bought the TILLS test because it seems to do a better job of assessing all four of listening, speaking, reading and writing in an integrated way (plus my CELF-5 is falling apart and we needed another language test!!). Kids with poor language who learn to read can then access language in a visual, non-transient form, so learning to read is great for your oral language, allows you to build vocabulary, gain exposure to a wider range of sentence types, see the difference between /f/ and /th/ if you’re not much of a face-watcher etc. Kids with poor literacy who don’t read much miss out on a lot of vocabulary and other language knowledge their peers learn from books, and that impoverishes their oral language. We need to get away from the old dichotomy I was taught in my speech pathology degree: stick to oral language, reading and writing are teachers’ business not yours. The fact of the matter is that listening, speaking, reading and writing are everyone’s business in education, including PE and cookery teachers – I read something recently (Christopher Such maybe? I’m at home with a cold today so can’t check, sorry) saying that to get/keep everyone’s fluency up to scratch, everyone should be reading about 400 words aloud every lesson. Too many kids don’t get to the 110 words correct per minute they need to confidently read for meaning and enjoyment, so there’s an argument to be put that every language assessment should include at least a one minute fluency assessment (maybe using DIBELS? as it’s free), and preferably something like the TOWRE with robust stats behind it. I can do a TOWRE in 5 minutes with a very cooperative kid, and it provides heaps of useful information about decoding and orthographic mapping. I wish we had a better, quick spelling test (I like the COST but it’s slow and doesn’t have a basal or ceiling). I’m planning to order the new TWS-6 and have high hopes for it, at the moment we use the TWS-5.
I hope that all made sense and didn’t seem like a mad rant! All the best, Alison
Not a mad rant at all! I’ve been involved with Kathryn Thorburn’s training recently and she is singing much the same tune! I was thinking about it because I wanted to look for more integrated assessment tools and provide better supports/recommendations for kids in class since they spend so much time in their classrooms. Let me know if you have any extra resources that could be helpful 🙂
Can I do this for individual students at my school?
Could this for part of my evidence under NCCd?
I think anyone can use it for any child, but you’d have to ask the NCCD people whether they would accept the results as evidence. I think they’d probably want something with robust statistical properties, maybe something like the Student Language Scale, which we’ve just bought and are hoping to use for screening. I don’t think any of the SPELDs sell it but I see you are in NSW, so maybe you could talk to the people at Silvereye about this screener. We just bought it, and it seems to have sound statistical properties https://www.silvereye.com.au/sls-student-language-scale/prod7371. Otherwise I suggest you talk to your Speech pathology and psychology team about what they recommend as a screening tool. Hope that’s helpful, all the best, Alison
Thanks for your work as always Alison! I also enjoyed reading your comments regarding the TILLS and the TOWRE-2, these are tools we are using regularly in our SSS context where I am currently working. Hope you feel better soon!
Kindest regards,
Tanelle