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Assessment of Persons Needing Accommodations and Supports: Communication Disorders
Verbal Communication 1. – Assume that the sample person cannot use between 1 and 5 verbalizations to communicate needs. Why not? Does the person have a Communication Disorder or are there cognitive or orthopedic impairments preventing verbalizations? What accommodations and supports are appropriate for this person?
Does the person have a Communication Disorder that impacts verbalizations?
A communication disorder becomes evident when a person exhibits a difficulty in communicating effectively. In this case, the term “effective” can include an entire spectrum from total inability to create a verbal expression, all the way to simple exercises for correcting pronunciation errors. Communication Disorders can generally be classified as Speech Disorders and/or Language Disorders.
There are cognitive impairments that impact effective communication. These generally tend to be Language Disorders There are orthopedic impairments that impact effective communication. These tend to be Speech Disorders There are social and psychological factors that impact effective communication. These can be either or both types of Communication Disorders.
In fact, the inability to communicate effectively can be a characteristic of many other conditions that impact a person’s ability to learn.
What accommodations and supports are appropriate for this person? First, the diagnosis of a communication disorder needs to be based on evaluations and assessments of a certified Speech-Language Pathologist.
This professional is familiar with therapeutic treatments and with augmentative and alternative communication devices including assistive technological devices that can be as simple as an amplifying device or as complex and a voice output device.
Working in collaboration with such a professional, a multidisciplinary team will have an expert resource for determining which therapeutic approaches will be most appropriate for the individual person.
Does the person have a cognitive impairment that impacts verbalizations?
Prior to PET scans and MRI scans, cognitive impairments were typically evaluated by using some sort of behavioral evaluation tool. Now, neuroscientists have the technological tools to determine very precisely, the ways in which neurological insult and injury can impact verbalizations.
However, short of doing full neurological evaluations of all persons that exhibit problems with verbalization, some of the old tried and true behavioral tools can still be used to accurately predict how cognitive impairment will impact verbalizations.
What cognitive accommodations and supports are appropriate for this person?
The licensed School Psychologist has been trained to administer cognitive and developmental tests and assessments. These assessment tools generally produce a measure of the extent of impairment in terms of what we commonly call a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ). Typically, intelligence tests produce a percentile ranking for several aspects of human intelligence that tend to conform with subsets of a generally accepted definition of human intelligence itself.
Most IQ tests are administered in a setting where the majority of the interactions between administrator and the person consist of verbal exchanges. A person with poor verbalization skills will typically not do well on such a test.
IQs have been a standard feature of psychological assessment for a hundred years or more. Not everyone in the professional community of psychologists agrees with typical theories of what makes up human intelligence.
Typically, human intelligence is being defined as having two main features – a measurement of our innate ability to acquire knowledge and a measurement of our ability to retain and to apply what knowledge we have acquired. In this case, the operative definition of “knowledge” tends to include (depending on the specific standardization history and upon the intended use of each specific assessment instrument) a very broad range of human abilities and skills.
Does the person have an orthopedic impairment that impacts verbalizations? What orthopedic accommodations and supports are appropriate for this person?
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