Where to start?

Do you ever wonder how to decide if a bilingual child has a developmental language disorder (DLD)? We have a new paper here where we outline one approach we developed to identify DLD in bilinguals when there isn’t a gold standard.

Usually, when you develop a new test or approach you compare how well it works against a gold standard. Sensitivity and specificity percentages are how well the new test classifies compared to the gold standard. If the new test is at least 80% accurate in its classification (both sensitivity and specificity), then we say it’s a good test. But, what do we do when there is no gold standard as is often the case when we are testing bilingual kids? Can we use this approach for different language pairs? WHERE DO WE START?

1. We started with expert clinicians. Clinicians who were Spanish-English bilinguals, who had several years of clinical experience, who had worked a lot with Spanish-English bilingual kids.
2. We looked at the literature. How does English DLD present? How does Spanish DLD present? Where would we see this?
3. Our expert clinicians reviewed test, interview and language sample data for 167 kids and made judgements about each of their languages in three domains: narratives, grammar, & semantics.

We made a form, where we asked clinicians to review each case, and to make notes. The included the three domains across the top, and the sources of information (here language samples) along the side.

Clinicians made their notes as they went through the files. We asked them to look at patterns of performance rather than at test scores (see example):

Then, we asked them to provide a rating for each language x domain, and an overall rating, based on their observations of children’s patterns of performance and their knowledge of ESL.

Every 10 cases, the three clinicians discussed the case together and their reasons for their ratings. They re-rated those cases after the discussion. Our findings are that there was high agreement overall in the domain ratings and in the decisions about who had impairment. When there were disagreements, they were usually a 1-point difference. What’s interesting is that even when they paid attention to different things, they were able to make judgements that were consistent with each other.

We then went back to look at the test scores of the kids that were judged to have and not have DLD. And we found large, significant differences on almost all measures of interest. We propose that this might be a good way to structure the data we collect when conducting bilingual assessment. We can then systematically rate each domain to then compare across languages and come up with a rating. We hope to expand this work, and we hope to see what kinds of measures and observations are informative for clinical decision making.

Recruiting Ph.D. Students

Yes, I am accepting students. I have a grant with Penelope Collins & Julie Washington which we call the Scientific Knowledge in Language & Literacy Diversity (SKiLLD) project.

The primary objectives of the SKLLD Project are to train doctoral personnel in special education (speech-language pathology, learning disabilities, reading disabilities, math disabilities) to:

• develop expertise in evaluation, appraisal, and development of effective interventions leading to better outcomes for children with special needs who speak non-standardized varieties of English (e.g., African American English; Spanish-influenced English), and who may speak English as a second language (culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD)).
• develop research competencies in data analysis, interpretation of research findings, and preparation of manuscripts that contribute to the field’s knowledge base in SPED.
• develop teaching and training skills to train future SPED practitioners including use of digital technologies.
• develop professional practice skills through engaged research in schools or other agencies that serve CLDs with special education needs.

The federally funded project will provide 2 years of full support (tuition, stipend, travel), and the other years are funded through a combination of TA and research work. Do contact any of the 3 of us if you are interested in this project.

Because this is the US Department of Education, you do have to be a permanent US resident or citizen. And you need to be a student in the school of education at UCI.

Potential students ask about the admissions process. We look at applications by area (Human Development is my area), and as a committee make recommendations to the admissions committee. The admissions committee looks at all the recommendations and determines the number of students who we can support. They try to balance the number of students by area and advisors. We are usually asked to interview students during the admissions process before the final decision. So, I will likely set up meetings in December.

New Resources Page

I’ve been wanting to do this for years and then it gets put off. But, we added a resources page to the HABLA lab webpage. Of course I’ve only added ONE thing to the page but the idea is to add resources that SLPs might find useful all in one place!

Applying for a Ph.D. Program in a Pandemic

Since summer I’ve been hearing reports of doctoral programs pausing or suspending admissions for the 2021 AY (here, here, and here). The financial future of some programs is uncertain, and in many places, including UCI where I am, we guarantee Ph.D. students 5 years of funding (tuition + stipend + travel $$). The cost for this is in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 250,000 per student. If we enroll 20 students for example, we’re talking 4-5 million dollars.

The other issue is that the academic job market this year sucks. Even in my field, speech-language pathology, where there are usually more academic jobs than Ph.D. graduates, I am not seeing too many tenure track positions. There are a handful and also a few clinical or lecturer jobs (non tenure track).

I think it’s unlikely we’ll accept as many students for 2021 as we did for 2020 at UCI School of Education. At the same time, there will be a lot of competition for these slots with other programs “pausing” for at least a year.

I think that the same issues in terms of selecting the right program and the right match continue to be important. You want to find the right mentor for sure. And you want the program to fund you– and to do so for the amount of time it will take you to finish. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t additionally seek your own funding– we encourage our students to seek out funding through the NSF, NIH, Ford, and other mechanisms. These grant give you excellent grant writing experience and may provide additional funding for equipment, travel, paying participants and so on. They help buid your expertise. But, don’t go into a grad program if you have to find all your funding.

I think that the thing to think about this year in particular is that if you don’t get into the program of your choice (or your top 3), that it’s not about you! It’s about things outside of your control– pandemic, financial fears, job outlook and so on. Regroup, talk with your potential mentors and be willing to try again. I seems that this year I’ve talked with a record number of students who want to go into a Ph.D., I don’t know if it’s coincidence, convergence, or a function of the pandemic, but I don’t know how it will play out in the current situation. If you get in to your program of choice, your funded and it’s a good match– go for it. If you don’t– please, try again– in speech-language pathology especially, we need you.

Interviewing a potential mentor

This is the time of year that I usually write about applying for Ph.D. programs (past posts address funding, the SLPD vs. Ph.D., and CSD or related field, among other posts). And yes, I am accepting students for next year (2021). I’m asked from time to time what to look for in a Ph.D. program, and how to find a good match.

I think I’m pretty consistent in saying that the number one consideration is finding a mentor. You will do his or her research. So, you want to find someone whose work you are interested in and would be excited to participate in. The next consideration is funding. Do not go if you are not funded. There’s no reason to do a Ph.D. without funding. That said, do not go if the mentor isn’t a good match no matter how good the funding is. So how do you find out about who is a good match or not? How do you find out about funding?

Do your homework

• read about the research being published in the area you are interested in working on
• read recent work
• pay attention to who the co-authors are (are they students and post docs)– publications are what is going to get you in the door for an academic career– you want to know that your potential mentor publishes with their students
• pay attention to author order– is the potential mentor ALWAYS the first author? (for me that’s a red flag– authorship order matters and should reflect level of contribution)
• read the program’s policy on funding (UCI for example guarantees 5 years of funding)

Ask questions

• if possible, visit the program, if not set up a zoom meeting with your potential advisor
• ask about their supervision style– do they meet with their students regularly? do they take a more hands-off approach? do they micromanage? none of these is good or bad but you need to know what to expect and what you are comfortable with
• ask about what they are working on now (you’ve done your homework and know what they’ve done, you can ask about that, but chances are there’s new stuff going on)
• ask about potential for publishing– how many are typical for students in that lab, how is author order decided, are there collaborations among students
• what about conference presentations (and travel)– is there funding for this?
• what are the expectations for taking courses (this is often program specific) for working in the lab, for contributing to on-going work, for collaboration
• talk to other students ask the same kinds of questions– everyone is going to have a different perspective and experiences of course, but you want to see some consistency (I think that it is perfectly okay to ask to talk with students and a mentor that doesn’t encourage this could signal that they are hiding something)
• talk to other potential mentors in the same program– I like my students to go learn from other people in the program and in other departments– they can’t possibly learn everything they need to know from me, so you should be able to go hang out in other labs as well
• ask about funding– what are the sources? expectations? I like to see students funded on a mix of research projects (for research experience), teaching assistantships (for teaching experience), and maybe fellowships– ask what the expectations are for each

Good luck to you as you decide to do a Ph.D., finding the right program and the right mentor(s) is absolutely critical.

Summer UCI Undergraduate Opportunity

Faculty Mentor:  Professor Elizabeth D. Pena,  Education

Description:  

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is one of the most common childhood disabilities. Approximately 1 in 14 children worldwide have DLD, and more have DLD secondary to other disabilities. Children who have exposure to more than one language have higher risk for misidentification as DLD. Language difficulties of bilinguals is often attributed to second language learning resulting in under-, delayed, and over- identification of DLD. Misidentification can lead to children having reduced access to appropriate instructional support, increasing risk for academic failure (García, et al., 2008). The Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition (HABLA) lab has been at the forefront of development of appropriate tools for accurate assessment of DLD in bilingual children. We have developed and published clinical tools that have over 80% diagnostic accuracy and made these available for school and clinical personnel.

Special education law under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that school districts conduct an evaluation to determine whether a child qualifies for special services within 60 days of consent. Most available tools (including ours) are standardized for face-to-face administration. In response to the current COVID19 pandemic, school districts nationwide have suspended special education assessment including language, psychological, and cognitive assessment stating that these measures are not normed for telepractice administration. This delay in appropriate identification can delay the services needed to ameliorate the long-term consequences of DLD. Thus, there is an urgent and critical need to validate existing measures and procedures for distance administration. For children who are bilingual, this is especially critical because they already are at risk for delayed services.

We propose to convene an interdisciplinary team to pilot the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment; Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence; and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives for on-line administration. Piloting this set of paper-based assessment measures will test feasibility for using web-based platforms for online language assessment. Specifically, we use different language tasks including: sentence completion, sentence repetition, vocabulary comprehension and expression, and storytelling tasks. We will compare on-line administration to face-to-face administration (using a convenience sample of clinicians who are at home with their children) to respond to the following questions:

• What are the similarities and differences in clinical administration across different types of measures (grammar, vocabulary, narrative, and cognitive)?
• What are the similarities and differences in user experience in the two administration conditions across measures?
• What is the test-retest reliability between the two conditions for each of these measures?
• What are the necessary procedures to adapt paper-based assessments protocol and capture assessment results on the web interface?
• What user portals can best support remote task administration between clinicians and children?

Student’s Involvement and Expected Outcomes:

Students will be involved in all aspects of exploring feasible online platforms for remote assessment, including tasks such as item analysis, constructing parallel measures using item analysis outcomes, developing the test protocol, on-boarding the test items to existing survey software (such as Qualtrics) and programming for automatic scoring, testing, interviewing, entering data, analyzing data, and writing up and presenting results. Undergraduate students will work with graduate and postdoctoral scholars in vertical mentoring teams to learn all aspects of study development, literature review, study design, test administration, and data evaluation. They will become familiar with data collection software including Qualtrics, statistical software including SPSS, and language analysis software including SALT (systematic analysis of language transcripts). They will have the opportunity to identify a specific research question (related to the overarching questions), analyze findings, and prepare those findings for presentation.

Prerequisites: 

Students from disciplines including education sciences, psychological sciences, cognitive science, computer science, engineering and informatics are welcome to apply. We especially welcome students who have coursework and/or experience in bilingualism, child development, language development, language analysis, computational linguistics, data science, computer science as well as students who have experience in working with children and with technology for the purpose of capturing and analyzing language behavior from an online format. Many of our projects involve speakers of Spanish or Vietnamese—fluency in these languages is a plus but not a requirement.

Recommended Web sites and publications: 

• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: https://www.asha.org/SLP/clinical/Considerations-for- Speech-Language-and-Cognitive-Assessment-via-Telepractice/
• Pandemic Response Meeting the Needs of Special Education Students : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6scx_lH5K_4&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2WTzgRJBnJCQToXjbi ClcAVVHMCpV88_JgxahvWjkf4ySe8zr_xR1fMSA
• McGill, N., Crowe, K., & McLeod, S. (2020). “Many wasted months”: Stakeholders’ perspectives about waiting for speech-language pathology services. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 1-14. doi:10.1080/17549507.2020.1747541:
• Sutherland, R., Hodge, A., Trembath, D., Drevensek, S., & Roberts, J. (2016, September). Overcoming barriers to using telehealth for standardized language assessments. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 1(SIG 18), 41–50.:
• Taylor, O.D, Armfield, N.R, Dodrill, P., & Smith, A.C. (2014). A review of the efficacy and effectiveness of using telehealth for paediatric speech and language assessment. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 20(7), 405–412. doi:10.1177/1357633X14552388:
• Waite, M. C., Cahill, L. M., Theodoras, D. G., Busuttin, S., & Russell, T. G. (2006). A pilot study of online assessment of childhood speech disorders. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 12(3_suppl), 92–94. doi: 10.1258/135763303779380048:
• Waite, M., Theodoros, D., Russell, T., & Cahill, L. (2010). Internet-based telehealth assessment of language using the CELF-4. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 41, 445–448.

Read more about SURF IoT here.

Application form here.

Grad Application Time: Learn to Play the Funding Game

So, it’s that time of year when propsective students are applying to Ph.D. programs. And here, I’m talking about Ph.D. not SLPD, not MA– but, the research Ph.D. I think that the most important consideration in selecting a Ph.D. program is finding a mentor or group of mentors whose work you are interested in. You want to find a good fit in terms of work style. Some mentors are more hands on, some are more hands off, there’s no right way– it’s more about the match.

The other thing that is really important is funding. Once you’ve identified your top 2-3 programs, you want to get the best funding package possible. Note that I still think that the match is more important than funding. It would be miserable to go for the most money but in a program where you don’t have a mentor that’s a good fit, or where you don’t get to do the work you want to do.

Most top programs are going to fund you for the entire program of study. At UCI’s SOE we certainly do that. And, the funding is generally the same for all students, but there are some differences. We cover the cost of tuition (in-state or out of state), and we provide a stipend. Usually students have jobs of some sort from year to year. Sometimes, they may work as a teaching assistant or as a research assistant. Both of these are good positions to have because they additionally give you good experience in teaching and research. Students who work on my grants for example have access to all the current and past data for their own research studies.

But, there is other funding available as well. And your program should try to get you all the funding you can get. Funding might be available for students with a high GPA or GRE, or there may be funding for students who attended certain schools, there’s also funding for students who are first generation students. Some of these funds are small extras– maybe covering summer (that’s important) or some extra funding during one or more of the years.

There may also be competitive funds. It’s a strange phenomenon that we (universities, not faculty per se) are willing to compete for students. So, if someone else wants to fund you, we want to fund you MORE! And, as such, if you have an offer from another institution, we can use that offer to GET YOU MORE MONEY!

Here’s the secret though. Wait, talk, wait, inform, communicate, and WAIT. Do not accept your offer to that program till ALL THE MONEY IS IN! It takes time to round up the $$, and once you say you’re coming, we CANNOT ask for more money. Most places won’t (or can’t) tell you this up front, but you can ask your mentor about it.

I know it seems strange to ask for money or to ask for more, and to share your offer so that you can get more, but help us help you by waiting and sharing your offers. This also means applying to more than one program (you want to do this anyway so that you can compare programs and find the right fit). So, go ahead and ask. Don’t go if you’re not funded, and stay in communication with your potential mentors and graduate coordinator. They will work to get you the best deal they can.

Applying to grad school

About this time last year I wrote a series of posts about graduate school. They are here:

• When should I contact potential adviser?
• Can I do a Ph.D. while working full-time?
• Ph.D. in CSD or in a related area?
• Ph.D. or SLPD?
• So you want to get a Ph.D.

I think that a lot of this still stands. I have two new students starting this year (yeah! the best part of the job), and I can still take another student (or two) for next year. In addition, I have 2 advanced Ph.D. students in the lab and a post doc.  So, we’re growing a bit.

We have weekly meetings with HABLA Lab @ Temple University as and former students who want to participate. We all participate in a writing group called “sharing our writing” that Amy Pratt named. It came out of discussions with Jissel Anaya and Nahar Albudoor (good ideas come out of these discussions and trying stuff in different ways). We meet once a week– a couple of days before, someone will submit something they are working on (background section, results, dicsussion, etc.) and 3 people sign up to give them feedback. One reviewer explains the study, a review and the other 2 add to the review/critique/suggestions. We all discuss. It helps us to keep going, to provide support and feedback, to learn to work together. And everyone at all stages of learning how to do research and write it up gets a turn. We celebrate at these different steps (and are even trying to celebrate or at least embrace rejection– it’s part of the process).

What does this have to do with applying to grad school? Well, I usually invite propective students to sit in on these meetings. I want them to get to know what actually goes on (not just hear about it). As a prospective grad student you want to talk to the different members of the lab, your potential mentor, other potential mentors (I believe in pushing people out of the nest to go hang in other labs), learn about the day to day work, and learn about the classes (although classes are classes, you know what that’s like at this point). Being able to participate in this stuff helps to do just that.

 

Center for Hearing Research 14th Annual Symposium

Register for our upcoming symposium. We hope to foster communication and interaction among participants.

Speakers include:

• Laurie Eisenberg
• Mary Fagan
• Lisa Bedore
• Stephanie de Anda
• Antje Inlefeld
• John Middlebrooks
• Elizabeth Peña
• Judith Kroll

Interested in Bilingual Testing?

We’ve been working with Dr. George Farkas with his reading one-to-one project. Reading one-to-one is a tutoring project for children who are struggling readers.

At the beginning of the year, we administered short screeners (BESOS) in Spanish and English to see where kids are in terms of their grammar and vocabulary in each language. And now we are ready to do end of year testing. We have about 100 kids to screen and it will take about 20 minutes to screen each kiddo. If you’re interested in language learning and what to get some first hand knowledge about the language of children this could be a good opportunity. We are looking for students who can spend 5-10 hours in the schools (in the morning) between now and the end of May.

If you’re interested, please complete the survey here and we’ll get in touch with you.