AAC Outcome Measurement & Progress Tracking 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which standardized tool is specifically designed to measure participation outcomes for AAC users across home, school, and community settings?
- PPVT-5
- FOCUS (Functional Outcomes of Communication for Users of AAC) (Correct answer)
- WAB-R
- TOWL-4
Correct answer: FOCUS (Functional Outcomes of Communication for Users of AAC)
FOCUS (Functional Outcomes of Communication for Users of AAC) is specifically designed to capture participation-based outcomes for AAC users across multiple environments.
Question 2: A clinician wants to assess whether an AAC intervention improved a student's ability to initiate communication in the classroom. Which data collection method is most appropriate?
- Standardized language sampling
- Event recording of spontaneous communication initiations (Correct answer)
- Portfolio of written work
- Audiological threshold testing
Correct answer: Event recording of spontaneous communication initiations
Event recording tracks the frequency of targeted behaviors such as spontaneous initiations, making it ideal for monitoring communication initiation goals.
Question 3: The Social Networks Inventory is used in AAC outcome measurement primarily to assess:
- Vocabulary size and semantic knowledge
- The breadth and quality of a communicator's social relationships (Correct answer)
- Motor planning for device access
- Literacy skills for symbol-based communication
Correct answer: The breadth and quality of a communicator's social relationships
The Social Networks Inventory maps an AAC user's communication partners and social relationships across circles of support.
Question 4: When graphing AAC progress data, a clinician notices performance is stable but below the aim line. The most appropriate response is to:
- Continue the current intervention for two more weeks without change
- Make an instructional modification to increase the rate of progress (Correct answer)
- Discontinue AAC services since the student has plateaued
- Switch to a different outcome measure
Correct answer: Make an instructional modification to increase the rate of progress
Data below the aim line for a stable trend indicates the current intervention is insufficient and an instructional change is warranted.
Question 5: Which concept describes the extent to which an AAC user spontaneously generates novel utterances rather than repeating modeled phrases?
- Aided language stimulation ratio
- Spontaneous Goal-Related Utterances (SGRUs) (Correct answer)
- Total Communication Equivalency
- Core Word Frequency Index
Correct answer: Spontaneous Goal-Related Utterances (SGRUs)
Spontaneous Goal-Related Utterances (SGRUs) measure the AAC user's ability to independently generate novel, targeted communication acts.
Question 6: A parent-completed questionnaire rated on a 5-point Likert scale is used to track an AAC user's communication at home. This type of tool is best described as:
- Direct observation measure
- Curriculum-based assessment
- Caregiver-report outcome measure (Correct answer)
- Norm-referenced standardized test
Correct answer: Caregiver-report outcome measure
A parent-rated questionnaire represents a caregiver-report outcome measure, capturing the perspective of a key communication partner in natural environments.
Question 7: In AAC progress monitoring, 'inter-rater reliability' refers to:
- The consistency of device performance across sessions
- Agreement between two or more observers scoring the same behavior (Correct answer)
- The match between baseline and post-intervention scores
- A symbol's recognizability across different raters
Correct answer: Agreement between two or more observers scoring the same behavior
Inter-rater reliability measures how consistently two or more observers record the same behavior, ensuring data accuracy and trustworthiness.
AAC Outcome Measurement & Progress Tracking 2
Which standardized tool is specifically designed to measure participation outcomes for AAC users across home, school, and community settings?