Choosing an Assessment and Intervention Method with the Linking Model
 From the May 2002 Early Childhood newsletter.
"It's a guide for looking at what you're doing and how to improve it," says Stephen Bagnato, co-author of LINKing Assessment and Early Intervention. Dr. Bagnato is referring to the book's LINK model, which is designed to help intervention programs find an appropriate tool for assessing possible developmental delays and designing intervention plans once they are found to be necessary.
LINK describes eight standards that program staff can use to determine the best tool for their program.
These eight standards are as follows:
- Authenticity — Dr. Bagnato emphasizes that "table-top testing" is not developmentally appropriate. A good assessment/intervention system should encourage staff to make natural observations of a child's behavior, in natural settings. Examples include a child's ability to recognize a favorite toy or a McDonald's sign.
- Collaboration — The assessment method should ensure that parents and professionals are partners in decision making.
- Equity — An assessment tool should allow staff to make accommodations for children with special sensory, motor, cultural, or other needs. The tool should measure a child's accomplishments rather that requiring the child to have specific sensory or motor skills.
- Sensitivity — There should be a sufficient number of items to assess behaviors of the lowest-functioning children as well as the most capable. Everyone's strengths and needs should be identified.
- Congruence — The method should be designed for use with children with disabilities; in other words, children with disabilities should have been included in the normed group.
- Convergence — The assessment approach should allow you to collect information from multiple people in multiple settings, bringing many pieces of information together. This is important because by observing children in multiple settings, including the home, and incorporating both observation and interview data, a professional is able to see the full range of a child's abilities.
- Acceptability — The assessment approach should be acceptable to both parents and professionals. Make sure the tool allows you to use a socially acceptable approach, such as play-based assessment instead of an IQ test. The process should tap "real" skills, such as a child's ability to communicate with others, as opposed to a child's ability to identify pictures.
- Utility — The method has to be useful for a specific purpose, such as intervention planning. For example, an IQ test would be useless for linking assessment and intervention because it has nothing to do with a child's development.
This last point is an important principle. "An assessment's purpose is to create individualized plans," notes Dr. Bagnato. "Goals then become benchmarks for measuring the progress a child is making." It is essential, says Dr. Bagnato, that assessment, intervention, and progress evaluation be linked together. "It's a check-and-balance system," he says.
In "LINKing," Dr. Bagnato and his co-authors apply the LINK model to a variety of assessment and early intervention planning tools, offering program staff a guide to how their current tools measure up to the standards. In the workshops the authors give for early intervention program staff, they ask participant teams to conduct a self-appraisal based on the eight standards and encourage them to come up with two or three goals for improvement in their approach. Explains Dr. Bagnato: "We want them to think about the process and style they use in assessment as well as the mechanics."
|
|
|
