Receptive Language Assessment App Review

If you’re a Splingo’s Language Universe app fan you might have noticed that The Speech & Language Store has introduced a new app called The Receptive Language Assessment. The app was released July 17, 2012 and is available in iTunes. They provided me with a copy of the app to review, but the opinions expressed within are my own.  The Receptive Language Assessment tests language comprehension of a variety of word types, at four different levels of complexity. The app was developed to assess language comprehension skills from Preschool level upwards.  Students are presented pages with vocabulary or directions to demonstrate knowledge of specific skills in 4 levels of increasing complexity. Clinicians can choose to add or remove the text on the page. Pressing the ‘repeat’ button in the right hand corner will repeat the verbal directions.  Students are presented with drawings of items. For prepositional concepts (behind, next to, etc.) a yellow arrow indicates the choices of placement. This probe asked the student to ‘Put the ball in front of the small garden.’ The student drags the soccer ball to the correct arrow. Demo’s are provided within the app to give students the ability to practice putting the items in the correct places.  Within the app you can quickly create student profiles. You can add thumbnail pictures if desired. As you can see above, during my trial I completed the full assessment. My sweet cousins were my kid testers and we didn’t get through the entire assessment so his is marked as incomplete assessment. You can pause the app and come back as needed.  The Receptive Language Assessment tests a variety of word and sentence types at four different levels of complexity: • 1 main word – object nouns, person nouns, location nouns, verbs, prepositions, size adjectives, color adjectives and attribute adjectives • 2 main words – seven different sentence types e.g. object-person, adjective-object etc • 3 main words – seven different sentence types, e.g. adjective-object-location, person-action-location etc • 4 main words – seven different sentence types, e.g. object-preposition-adjective-location, person-action-preposition-location The data results provide percentages of correct answers as well as copies of each probe, identifying individual errors. The clear and professional report can be saved, emailed and printed your records.  You can select a select start and end point based on your clients language levels. The entire assessment includes 116 probes.  The assessment is divided into levels 1-4. If you start at level 1 it will continue and take you through each probe. It took me  over 30 minutes to complete all the probes. Likely your students will need breaks or to complete all the probes over a period of time.  Overall what I really like about this app is the ability to create a baseline of my client’s skills for understanding sentence structure and following directions of increasing complexity. The kids loved the reward system where Splingo the entertaining alien does flips as they complete tasks.  The bottom line for purchasing as assessment for therapy is how will I be able to use it. The app doesn’t include any norm referenced data or suggested age references for each skill. I will use it to generate baseline data to generate treatment objectives. Adding developmental norms for each skill would increase the value of this app immensely to make it usable to for a variety of users. SLP’s will use clinical knowledge to make judgements about age appropriate skills, but parents who use this app may be left with results but no way to interpret them.  The app crashed a few times when I tried to ‘resume’ a test. A bug I’m sure the creators will work out quickly.  Visit The Speech and Language Store’s page to find out more about their products. 

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