Home | Clinical Café Archive | May 2005

Scoring Nuances of the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) Part 2: Administration, Prompting, Repetition, and Questions

Clinical Café By Kathy Swiney, CCC-SLP, BRS-FD

May 2005 Clinical Café
By Kathy Swiney, CCC-SLP, BRS-FD

Download this article in a printable PDF file format:

PDF File

No matter how thorough the instructions are in the Examiner's Manual, situations invariably arise which seem to fall outside the range of these instructions and require further clarification. It is these situations we hope to address in this series of columns.

Follow the order of administration instructions

Instructions in the CASL Examiner's Manual state that tests must be administered in order. The examiner should give the Core tests first, starting with those in Test Book 1, then those in Test Book 2, followed by those in Test Book 3. Supplementary tests may be administered in any order.

Administration

Test Order

I test a lot of very young children. Wouldn't it save time and improve performance if I could administer all of the Core and Supplementary tests from each test book at one time?

You are certainly right to be concerned about the attention span and fatigue level of young children when administering any standardized test. There are, however, two reasons that the core tests must be administered in order and prior to the administration of any supplementary tests.

First, to obtain standard scores for the examinee, the tests, including test order, must be administered in the same manner as done during the standardization process. This makes it possible for the child's performance to be truly compared to the normative group. Secondly, the core tests measure those skills most representative of each category for each of the six age bands. From this standpoint, it is important to administer the core tests first, when the child is most attentive. The supplementary tests provide additional diagnostic information and should be administered at the end of the test session or during a subsequent test session. The supplementary tests are selected at the discretion of the examiner and may be administered in any order.

Sentence Comprehension

In this test, two pairs of sentences are read. The examinee has to respond correctly to both sentence pairs for a score of 1. If the child misses the first sentence, would the examiner have to read the second sentence?

You must give all the sentences in the Sentence Comprehension of Syntax test because that follows standardization procedures. The "1" is simply a scoring rule. In addition, if you don't administer the items like you told the child you would, it could be confusing, misleading, or inappropriately indicate to the child that he or she missed an item.

This same procedure also applies to Grammaticality Judgment. For this test, the procedure is clearly defined in "Important Points to Remember During Testing." The instructions related to this topic are repeated here:

• If the examinee says "yes" to an incorrect sentence, go on to the next item.
• If the examinee says "no" to a correct sentence, let him or her try to fix it. Do not indicate at any time other than with the examples that the examinee has given an incorrect response (from Test Book 2).

Click here for "Frequently Asked Questions" on CASL

SLP Discussion Center

As always, we'd like to thank you for your ongoing service to people with communication needs and to remind you that we are here to support you in that effort. If you'd like to discuss this topic further, please feel free to use the SLP Discussion Center as the vehicle for an ongoing discussion with your colleagues. Should you have questions regarding these or other Pearson Speech and Language products, we welcome your phone calls at 800-627-7271 or use our web site at http://ags.pearsonassessments.com.