What is it about?

Detailed assessment and progress monitoring is fundamental to the Response to Intervention (RtI) model often implemented in schools. This study compared children's performance on the RAPT to their performance on the Profile of Oral Narrative Ability (PONA). Both tasks were sensitive to progress, but if only the RAPT task had been used, up to 21% of students performing below expectations in oral narrative would not have been identified.

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Why is it important?

Oral narrative proficiency is vital for participation in the curriculum; It is strongly linked to reading comprehension and academic achievement. By using a sentence-level task such as the RAPT to monitor progress following Tier 1 intervention, children who demonstrate weaknesses in oral narrative performance may not be identified.

Perspectives

Although it may take a little bit longer to elicit, transcribe and analyze an oral narrative (compared to eliciting and analyzing 10 unrelated sentences), we urge educators and speech pathologists to carefully consider which task may yield the most ecologically valid information.

A/Prof Marleen F Westerveld
Griffith University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, January 2017, Karger Publishers,
DOI: 10.1159/000485974.
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