The Social Language Development Test–Adolescent: Normative Update (SLDT-A: NU) assesses language-based social skills. Specifically, it measures students’ ability to make inferences, and interpret and respond to social interaction. Performance on the test differentiates typically developing students from those with autism spectrum disorder.

New Features

• The norms have been updated to reflect the demographics of the 2016 U.S. Census.
• The normative sample (N = 868) is stratified by age relative to geographic region, gender, race, and ethnicity.
• New standard score metric for subtests and composites (M = 10, SD = 3; M = 100, SD = 15).
• All-new item analysis and item bias studies provide convincing evidence of content-description validity.
• All-new reliability and validity studies were prepared, including diagnostic accuracy analyses, which are considered the most rigorous techniques for establishing validity today. These analyses involve the computation of sensitivity and specificity indexes and the receiving operating characteristic/area under curve (ROC/AUC) statistic.
• The audio files for the Interpreting Ironic Statements subtest are available for use or download online.

Description of the Test

The test has five subtests (Making Inferences, Interpreting Social Language, Problem Solving, Social Interpretation, and Interpreting Ironic Statements) that yield scaled scores. A composite score, called the Social Language Development Index, represents overall performance on the subtests. The Examiner’s Manual discusses the test’s theoretical and research-based foundation, item development, standardization, administration and scoring procedures, normative tables, and guidelines for using and interpreting the test’s results. Reliability and validity studies were conducted with students with typical language abilities and students who had previously been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
The average coefficient alpha ranges between .76 and .86 for the subtests and is .95 for the composite. New validity studies demonstrate the test’s ability to differentiate students with autism spectrum disorder from typically developing students. The results demonstrate that a Social Language Development Index cutoff score of 90 resulted in a sensitivity of .71, a specificity of .96, and a ROC/AUC of .90

COMPLETE SLDT-A: NU KIT INCLUDES: Examiner’s Manual, Scoring Standards and Example Responses Book, Picture Book, and 25 Examiner Record Booklets, all in a sturdy storage box. (©2017)

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• • • identify and interpret facial expressions, gestures, posture, proximity, and wordless vocalizations (hmmm, ah-ha, duh, etc.) in isolation and together

Making inferences:

• • • pay attention to relevant details and ignore irrelevant ones
    • use context, body language, and other clues to make reasonable inferences about what is happening and why

Problem solving

• • • recognize the feelings of others as a priority when solving problems
    • thinking of solutions that preserve and/or create friendships

Multiple interpretations

• • • think of more than one logical interpretation for a situation
    • develop flexibility in thinking and consider the logical possibilities

Social Interaction

• • • learn to pay attention to body language, facial expressions, vocal intonation (when possible), and the expressive language of their peers, acquaintances, family members, strangers, and authority figures
    • learn to recognize appropriate and inappropriate reactions to these people and what to say and do
    • handle difficult social situations appropriately
    • support friends and preserve friendships

Interpreting Perspectives

• • • Understand the key factors in evaluating others’ perspectives
    • recognize that people in the same situation can think different thoughts and have different opinions

Interpreting Idioms and Sarcasm

• • • learn to recognize the paralinguistic features of conversations that are replete with innuendo, sarcasm, and metaphors in order to react appropriately in social situations

Interpersonal Negotiations

• • • learn to compromise, acquiesce, problem solve, listen, seek mutual resolutions, and negotiate

To see more of this product’s contents:

• • • • Introduction
      • Sample Pages
      • References
      • About the Authors

184 pages • 8.5 x 11, softcover • ©2010

Supporting Success is happy to offer this product from ProEd/Linguasystems Publications.

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Encouragement and information for families who have just found out their child has hearing loss, or who are well into trying to support them as they experience life challenges.
Hippopotamus includes important reflections and perspectives that are of benefit to all professionals who work with children with hearing loss.

Written by a dad of a child who is deaf and has multiple disabilities, the book talks about the joys, hopes, dreams, concerns, and issues of raising a child with special needs.
The author talks about his and his family’s life, and how his son’s special needs have changed – often for the positive – their lives.

The book is organized by topics, and is written as a series of articles and short stories that explain these topics and their impact on the family, in an often uplifting and poignant way as the child moves from childhood to adulthood.

Topics include a number of different issues including areas such as being the parent of a child with special needs, perseverance, hope, travel, school, as well as many others.

The author approaches these topics from a unique perspective. Besides being a parent of a child with special needs, he is also the training coordinator for parents and families for a statewide project and works with families, and educational professionals across the state of Florida.

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Children with hearing loss can develop up to 4 years in pragmatic language delays by age 7! This often over looked area of concern requires direct intervention. These worksheet materials and activities are useful working 1:1, in small groups, push-in services, or co-teaching classrooms.

Say and Do Positive Pragmatic Game Boards Fun Sheets helps children learn to use appropriate social skills in everyday situations.

This 170-page reproducible includes a variety of engaging things to do, including fill-ins, role-playing, puzzles, stories, and more. Help your students have super social skills in the following areas:

• Giving Information
• Persuasion
• Requesting
• Telephone Manners
• Problem Solving
• Feelings
• Figurative Language
• Appropriate Interaction
• Greetings/Politeness
• Topic Maintenance

You also receive a parent/helper letter, an answer key, awards, and an open-ended game board that you can customize for each student.

“These pages are fun for my kids to do. They also open up conversations we may not have thought to have had naturally – such as the “convince me” pages opening up discussions about how parents hear politeness versus whining 😉 “

“This book has great reproducibles for teaching pragmatic speech to children of all ages. I especially loved the chapter on emotions and feelings.”

“As a speech/language therapist, I work closely with special education teachers. We team teach language lessons together. Positive Pragmatic Combo allows us a variety of ways to teach our students. especially our ASD students a fun way to learn pragmatic skills.”

© 2003

Supporting Success is happy to offer this product from SuperDuper Publications.

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• compare and contrast facial expressions
• interpret facial expressions and gestures appropriately
• understand the vocabulary for describing and interpreting emotions

Making inferences

• pay attention to relevant details and ignore irrelevant ones
• use context, body language, and other clues to make reasonable inferences

Problem solving

• identify problems
• predict the consequences and choose the best solution
• evaluate the results

Multiple interpretations

• observe details
• ifferentiate important from unimportant details
• use logic

Friendship

• think about how others might feel
• understand how friends act toward each other
• handle difficult social situations appropriately
• support friends and preserve friendships

Respecting others

• how to show respect to peers, siblings, and adults

Interpersonal negotiation

• identify the qualities of a good friend
• disagree tactfully
• seek mutual resolutions to problems
• use persuasion effectively

Reading between the lines

• interpret nonverbal communication, sarcasm, and tone of voice
• the use of vague communication

To see more of this product’s contents:

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Pages
• References
• About the Authors

184 pages • 8.5 x 11, softcover • ©2009

Supporting Success is happy to offer this product from ProEd/Linguasystems Publications.

The post Social Language Training Elementary first appeared on Supporting Success For Children With Hearing Loss.

Social Skills Comics: Conversation Skills in School

• Detailed pictures help children observe body language and nonverbal cues
• Ages 7-12

Social Skills Comics: Conversation Skills in School

These 25 “comics” are designed to show children the expected and unexpected ways to behave in a variety of typical school social situations. Detailed photos prompt children to take a closer look at dialog, body language, and nonverbal cues in both scenarios.

Topics include:

• reading body language
• using humor in conversation
• asking a question
• accepting compliments
• ending a conversation
• many more!

Supporting Success is a reseller of carefully selected Childswork/Childsplay products at a great price!

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We were thrilled to hear about the SEAM checklists (new in 2014) for early childhood and was even more impressed when I used it for the first time. The CD comes with checklists for a variety of ages in a variety of formats and also in Spanish. It allows you to select what you need as most appropriate to the family or preschool-age child. I heartily recommend using the SEAM checklists throughout early childhood and into kindergarten.

Social-Emotional Assessment / Evaluation Measure (SEAM)

With this in-depth, easy-to-use tool, you can reliably assess and monitor social-emotional development in infants, toddlers, and preschoolers at risk for delays or challenges. An ideal followup to screeners such as the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ:SE), the two-part SEAM™ assessment reveals detailed qualitative information on children’s social-emotional competence— and identifies their caregivers’ strengths and areas of need. Easy to learn and implement, SEAM can be used by a wide variety of early childhood professionals, including those with little or no training in mental-health or behavioral interventions.

Social-Emotional Assessment / Evaluation Measure $47.00 + S/H
SEAM helps you:

• support development of important social-emotional skills in order to minimize challenging behaviors
• build strong, proactive partnerships with families
• promote positive parent-child interactions in the critical first years of life
• assist with developing developmentally appropriate goals and intervention activities
• monitor child progress toward social-emotional goals

SEAM is a two-part assessment; All forms are available in English and Spanish on the CD-ROM or e-book.

SEAM Tool

The main SEAM includes three intervals with different developmental ranges:Infant (2–18 months), Toddler (18–36 months), and Preschool (36–66 months). Each interval assesses 10 child benchmarks critical to social-emotional competence, including empathy, adaptive skills, self-image, emotional responses, and healthy interactions with others.

SEAM is flexible enough to meet your specific needs—parents/caregivers can complete it independently, or you can conduct it jointly with them if they need extra guidance. The SEAM system also includes SEAM with Ages, an alternate version of the tool annotated with a helpful list of age ranges for each item. This version makes it easy to give caregivers general guidance on how social-emotional skills typically develop and where their child’s development fits on the continuum.

SEAM Family Profile 

The Family Profile assesses parent and caregiver strengths and helps identify areas in which they need more supports and resources to foster their child’s social-emotional skills. Like the main SEAM, the Family Profile assessment includes three intervals—Infant, Toddler, and Preschool. Each interval measures four benchmarks key to a nurturing home environment: responding to needs, providing activities and play, providing predictable routines and an appropriate environment, and ensuring home safety.

List of SEAM benchmarks

• Child participates in healthy interactions
• Child expresses a range of emotions
• Child regulates social-emotional responses
• Child begins to show empathy for others
• Child attends to and engages with others
• Child explores hands and feet and surroundings (for infants)/demonstrates independence (for toddlers/preschoolers)
• Child displays a positive self-image
• Child regulates activity level
• Child cooperates with daily routines and requests
• Child shows a range of adaptive skills

View the webinar recording of Using the Social-Emotional Assessment/Evaluation Measure (SEAM™) with Young Children, presented by Jane Squires, Ph.D., and Misti Waddell, M.S.

See which domain of school readiness in the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework this tool addresses.

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Students with hearing loss often have social issues, even if they may be performing well academically. These differences may appear in preschool and intensify as the children become older. It is challenging to ‘make the case’ for services for a student without data. Although there are a number of functional measures of pragmatic language and theory of mind conceptualization, in many areas functional data is not seen as a sufficient basis for eligibility determination. After searching extensively, we came across this test and felt it fit the needs of our population well. Ideally, the SLDT-NU will be used to validate and further define social interaction issues that have been raised as issues of concern based on student or teacher checklists. Being able to quantify specific social interaction issues with a percentile rank and age equivalent score adds credence to the true importance of considering social language needs for students with hearing loss. This is a very important aspect of assessment for students who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Social Language Development Test – Elementary: Normative Update

Ages 6-11; Grades 1-6

Many children with language delays, including those with hearing loss, exhibit poor social interaction with others. These differences may appear as early as preschool and continue or intensify as these children mature.

The Social Language Development Test – Elementary is designed to assess language-based skills of social interpretation and interaction with friends, the skills found to be most predictive of social language development. Specifically, it measures the language required to appropriately infer and express what another person is thinking or feeling within a social context, to make multiple interpretations, take mutual perspectives, and negotiate with and support their peers. These tasks reflect the developmental refinement of social language comprehension and expression and differentiate typically developing children from those with social development issues. You will gain insight into your student’s social understanding and social language competency. The SLDT now has updated norms based on the 2015 US Census. All new analyses were conducted on item sensitivity, item bias, reliability and validity. The SLDT-E: NU is very psychometrically solid and representative of today’s students.

Social Language Development Test – Elementary

Test Description

Many children perform well on traditional language tests, yet their social language skills are inadequate. This test will substantiate the influence of your students’ language issues on their social disorders and qualify them for services.

The test assesses students’ language-based responses to portrayed, peer-to-peer situations which is unlike other tests which rely on observation forms.

The test assesses the language required to appropriately infer and express what another person is thinking or feeling within a social context, to make multiple interpretations, take mutual perspectives, and negotiate with and support their peers.

Test tasks reflect the developmental refinement of social language comprehension and expression and differentiate typically-developing children from those with language learning disorders or autism.

Subtests
Subtests consist of question-answering tasks, interpretations of photographed scenes, and verbal explanations.

• Subtest A: Making Inferences
  The student infers what someone in a picture is thinking. There are two questions per item. The first question asks the student to pretend he is the person in the photo and to make an inference about what the person would be thinking. This question examines the student’s ability to use the information from facial features, body language, and context to respond. The second question asks the student to say what information from the photo he used to make the inference.

• Subtest B: Interpersonal Negotiations
  The student pretends he is in conflict with a peer. There are three tasks. The student must identify the problem, propose an appropriate resolution, and explain why that resolution is mutually satisfactory.

• Subtest C: Multiple Interpretations
  The student shows flexible thinking by giving two different, plausible interpretations of the same photo.

• Subtest D: Supporting Peers
  The student pretends he is in a situation with a peer. The student tells what to say in reaction to the friend’s situation. The degree of support given to the friend, not the truthfulness of the response is examined in this subtest.

Components
Test Set includes: examiner’s manual, scoring standards and example responses book, photo stimuli book, 25 test forms.
Copyright 2016

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Pragmatics is the component of oral language that is most directly associated with social interactions. Pragmatics governs the use of language in context. Thanks to recent research by Christie Yoshinaga-Itano and colleagues (see summary below and graph), it is clear that children with hearing loss are at very high risk for delays in pragmatic language development. Routinely as children who are deaf or hard of hearing are evaluated for strengths and needs there are language assessments performed. Currently, most popular standardized test batteries of oral language do not include norm-referenced, reliable, and valid measures of pragmatic language. Those that do, often test for knowledge of pragmatics, not the actual behavior of the child. The PLSI is a teacher checklist that has strong psychometrics to be able to clearly identify issues, even for children as young as kindergarten. 

The US focus on Core Content Standards places full-participation in the classroom setting of tantamount importance. Students with hearing loss in the mainstream are expected to be able to participate fully in verbal instruction, cooperative learning, and 1:1 with others under typical classroom conditions (excessive noise, reverberation). We cannot assess a student’s ability to fully participate in their classroom without also considering their social communication skills. Clearly there is a need to quickly identify if a student is likely to have significant pragmatic language deficits!

Ages: 5-0 through 12-11
Testing Time: 5-10 minutes Introduction to the PLSI
Administration: Individual

The Pragmatic Language Skills Inventory (PLSI) is an easy-to-use, norm-referenced rating scale designed to assess children’s pragmatic language abilities. Its 45 items can be administered in only 5-10 minutes.

The PLSI has three subscales:

• Personal Interaction Skills, assesses initiating conversation, asking for help, participating in verbal games, and using appropriate nonverbal communicative gestures.
• Social Interaction Skills, assesses knowing when to talk and when to listen, understanding classroom rules, taking turns in conversations, and predicting consequences for one’s behavior.
• Classroom Interaction Skills, assesses using figurative language, maintaining a topic during conversation, explaining how things work, writing a good story, and using slang appropriately.

Cut-off scores are provided for determining whether the student exhibits characteristics of a pragmatic language disorder. Guidelines are provided to assist the examiner in interpreting the results.

Reliability and validity ratings are exceptionally strong and support the use of the PLSI as a diagnostic instrument. Teachers, early interventionists, and other professionals will find this test useful and thorough. Identify students who have a disorder, document progress in ability, collect data for research, and target pragmatic language goals all with this succinct test, user-friendly test.

COMPLETE PLSI KIT INCLUDES: Examiner’s Manual and 25 Summary/Response Forms.

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Motivate your students to develop and improve their social skills with “Ask & Answer” Social Skills Games. To play, you ask social skills related questions (found in the handy activity booklet), and the students answer what they would do in these situations. Players cover their “picture cue” game board spaces with colorful foam tokens as they play. First player to get three in a row wins!

Each of the six skill areas has four game boards, allowing one to four players to engage in the fun. Each board includes nine realistic photos that provide excellent visual cues for the targeted social skills. Can be used with students PreK and up.

You not only get 24 playing surfaces (12 game boards printed front and back), but you get an activity booklet that provides four relevant social skill questions per picture. That’s 216 questions in all!

Ask and Answer Social Skills Game $55.00 + S/H
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“Ask & Answer” Social Skills Games target six different skill areas
Politeness
Solving Problems
Staying on Topic
Requesting Information
Initiating Conversation
Feelings

The questions are organized, making it easy to match the question to the board number, letter, and row on each student’s game board. The activity booklet also contains a number of reproducible activity/homework sheets for additional social skills practice, as well as awards.
Need to adapt the boards for those students who have difficulty paying attention to nine pictures? Use the foam squares to cover a desired number of pictures prior to playing.

Ask and Answer Social Skills Games are very adaptable for use with students with hearing loss. The photos show young children all they way up to adults. Figure out the skill(s) your student needs to develop. Select the appropriate game board(s) and then use the specific prompts provided. Adapt the language level of the prompts as needed to target specific language skills along with broader interaction and social skills.
Resold from SuperDuper by Supporting Success at a great price! View here to see the video of this product by SuperDuper
Instructions for Games Samples
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Ask & Answer”Social Skills Games:

24 color-coded game playing surfaces (12 game boards printed front and back)
68-page activity booklet with reproducible social skills questions
48 foam squares (4 different colors)

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