The developers over at Little Bee Speech have released a follow up to their first app, Articulation Station. The Articulation Test Center was released today, November 11, 2013. I’m so excited to bring you this review. There are very few app assessments in the market, so having a new possibility was exciting to me before I even got started! 
The Articulation Test Center is an articulation and phonology test developed for the iPad. It contains a Full Test and a Quick Test. The Full Test is a more traditional full assessment of sounds in words. The Quick Test is used for quickly screening a student’s articulation of specific sounds based on the age and expected development. 
I started with the Full Test. Even within the Full Test there are options to include/exclude certain targets (initial blends, R sounds, vowels, etc.) If you select each option you will use 59 stimulus cards. 
Each card will contain an image and label. The student says the word and the clinician uses the letters at the top of the screen to score phoneme production. 
If you click on the green tile one time if turns red (for error), tap twice to get yellow (close approximation), or swipe upward to indicate omission. For substitutions press the down arrow to the right of the word. 
You can drag the substituted sound to replace the tile. For example I moved the /w/ to replace the /r/ in rabbit. 
To mark a phonological process, touch that tab and drag the appropriate symbol to the tile. In this example I marked the /r/ error as gliding. 
You have the option to record the student’s production using the record button on the left hand side. 
You can also make notes by pressing the ‘notes’ section. These will be viewable in the results section. 
Once you finish the cards, use a speech sample scene to collect a running speech sample. 
The scene displays many characters or items. The student can click on a image and the object will zoom in and give a conversational prompt. You can record during the entire time this screen is open and play back later for transcription. 
When you’re done with the speech sample you will be prompted to identify the student’s intelligibility as poor, fair, or good. 
Save the test to an existing account or add a new student’s information. 
When you look at the report, you can select ‘edit results’ and go back into the test. So if you would like to go back and mark phonological processes this might be a better and quicker option than doing it during assessments. 
There are several tabs to look at in the report section. First you will see the words tested and the errors you marked. 
You can look at the specific errors, substitutions and processes. You will see the developmental age norm for each sound. 
The Speech Sample page lets you listen to the speech sample recording. You can transcribe the sample into the right hand side and then count the number of errors in a 100 word sample. I love the ability to listen and type the transcription right into the app for safe keeping. 
The app automatically generates a report. It includes paragraphs for sounds errors that are appropriate developmentally and errors that are no longer appropriate. 
The recommendations section shows you exact sound errors for treatment. Check out the full video below for a walk through of the app. Articulation Test Center – Full Test Tutorial from Little Bee Speech on Vimeo. 
The Quick Test assesses articulation by looking at only sounds based on the age of the student. I used this assessment as a 3:6 year old girl, which meant I used the 3-4 year old sounds (h,w,m,n,p,b,t,d,k,g,f,y). This particular screening included 20 cards. 
During the Quick Testing you can’t mark substitutions or phonological processes. Instead you just mark the sound as incorrect or approximated. 
At the end of the screening you can select an intelligibility rating. 
The results page is the same as the Full Test version. You can easily email a report to yourself for use with evaluations, IEPs, progress notes, or a Plan of Care. So let’s get to the overall thoughts. Pros: The Articulation Test Center gives SLPs more tools at their fingertips making assessment and progress monitoring simple. The app gives you lots of ways to mark errors rather than just right or wrong. The app gives you a lot of flexibility with data tracking. Giving the developmental norms for each sound/process in the report saves therapists time and produces easy to read results for parents. The aesthetics with clean lines and crisp papers appease my picky palate! Cons: I wish the app could auto score phonological processes. If working with young kids (those often having phonological errors) you have to mark the substitutions and then move through and also think about and mark the phonological process. You can get pretty quick at adding substituted sounds but adding phonological errors is more time intensive. Maybe future upgrades can do some of this automatically. I’d love it if there could be a multisyllable word portion added to the assessment. I’d also really love the ability to add an insertion when scoring the productions (I have this happening a lot on my caseload! Instead I will just add that information in a ‘note’ for now). Recommended? Yes. The Articulation Test Center is current priced at $39.99. This is a 20% off sale that will end Tuesday (19th) evening at midnight (MST) in honor of ASHA. If you’re at ASHA this week you can stop and see them at their booth #719. My friends at Little Bee Speech want to give one lucky SLP a free copy of the new app. Please enter using rafflecopter below. a Rafflecopter giveaway The opinions in this review are only mine. I was provided a copy of this app and no other compensation was provided.
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