What to expect during your child’s speech therapy evaluation
An evaluation is the first step when beginning a speech therapy journey, but what can you expect? Every clinic may do things differently, but generally speaking, evaluations will follow a fairly typical structure. Before your appointment begins, you will likely receive intake paperwork. This can include things like privacy information, brief explanation of your concerns, developmental milestones, insurance information, etc. Completion of these documents prior to evaluation can help your SLP determine which evaluation assessments may be the best fit for your child.
At Confident Communicators Speech Therapy, we begin every evaluation with a parent interview. During this interview, we ask questions to help us paint a picture of development. We might ask questions about developmental milestones such as walking, babbling, first word use, etc., and get a more in depth description of your concerns. This helps us direct the evaluation to ensure we’re seeing everything we need to make a plan. During this interview, we may ask a lot of questions that relate to the things your child struggles with. This can be hard, but necessary so we can get the complete picture. That said, we will also want to know the things that your child excels at! These skills are equally important when we’re learning about your child and their communication.
While we talk with you and gain insight into your child, we will also bring out a variety of toys for your child to play with. This allows us the chance to observe them during play. We might see how they react if they need help, want to gain access to a toy, or want to show you something. This helps us to see how they engage and communicate in a more natural way. In some cases, we may observe you playing with your child. This is especially helpful for more shy children. This allows us to see communication in a more natural way, rather than communication with a stranger who is writing things down and controlling the play.
Some evaluations are brief, such as those for speech sounds only. These are generally pretty straightforward (with some exceptions for more complicated speech sounds disorders). Other evaluations, such as those looking at language needs, may take a bit longer and be more involved. With these, we are looking at multiple aspects of communication, such as the language they use, the language they understand, and social communication.
Once we’ve completed the parent interview and observation, we begin the formal testing. Not every standardized test is perfect, but it does allow us to see how your child’s communication skills compare to peers of the same age. If your child shows no interest, or has a hard time completing the assessment, that’s okay! We can still move forward with other testing strategies to get the information we need. Standardized testing helps support eligibility for services, particularly in schools or when dealing with insurance. They do not, however, give us all the information we need, and speech services will not be determined on standardized tests alone.
While the evaluation is being completed, an oral mechanism exam may be completed as well. This is a quick test to look at the oral structures (tongue, lips, teeth, etc.) and how they move. Results of the oral mech exam can help us rule out any neurological conditions that may be impacting your child’s oral motor skills. Other things that may happen during an evaluation include language samples, AAC trialing, or reading tasks. This depends on the information we receive and what skills need to be assessed.
Once the evaluation is done and you’ve left the clinic, a treatment report will be completed. This report will include all of the information discovered through the evaluation, a treatment plan, and goals that will guide therapy sessions. These goals give us specific skills to track, helping us to see progress. As goals are met, new goals will be introduced.
Speech therapy evaluations include lots of information, and they can feel like a lot all at once. I always recommend parents write down their thoughts, notes, and goals for their child, so that once the evaluation begins, they can ask any questions they may have while feeling less overwhelmed.