The Problematic Nature of Standardized Tests (Part 1)

This will be a multi-part blog series mainly because standardized assessments are so engrained in the speech therapy culture that there is a lot to uncover about the nature of these tests and why they are problematic to use.

In this article, we will discuss the inherent bias of these standardized tests and why they should not be used as the sole marker of a child’s speech and language skills.

Standardized tests are inherently biased. Now, why would/can I make such a blanketed statement. If one were to look at what most of these tests were normed on, they would see that the population that they used to determine whether a child is scoring in the “average range” for their age and gender did not account for differences in SES, culture, disability, and/or linguistic/language backgrounds. This means that if your child comes from a different background than the children they used to determine the averages on their test, they may score differently than if these differences were accounted for. So, what should have been identified as a language difference could now be identified as a language disorder.

So, let’s say for example a child speaks Spanish and English at home and that child was being tested on verb tenses. Well, irregular past tense verbs do not exist in Spanish, therefore the child may be getting those questions wrong on a standardized test because he/she has not had the exposure to this type of grammar. So, what should we do as SLPs? We need to spend time evaluating whether this is a language difference or a language disorder (more on this to come).

Overall, when a standardized test does not take into account the different backgrounds stated above, it causes child to be misidentified thereby resulting in poor treatment plans and wasted speech therapy sessions.