Supporting Culturally Responsive Assessment Practices With Preschoolers: Guidance From Methods in the Jamaican Context.
Karla N Washington, Rachel Wright Karem, Leslie E Kokotek and 1 others
PMID 37549376WHAT IT FOUND
Adapting standardized tests to include Jamaican Creole features reduced the identification of language disorder in bilingual preschoolers from 48.9% to 7.4%.
Using adult community models for scoring prevented misdiagnosis of dialect differences as disorders.
Key findings
01Traditional scoring of a standardized English language test identified 48.9% of Jamaican Creole–English bilingual preschoolers as having a language disorder, whereas adapted scoring that accounted for Creole features identified only 7.4%.
02The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) and its Jamaican Creole version (ICS-JC) accurately distinguished between typically developing children and those with suspected speech sound disorders, with a cutoff mean score of 4.12 indicating potential disorder.
03A culturally adapted protocol for assessing speech production captured a wider range of acceptable responses and resulted in higher percentage of consonants correct scores (97.62) compared to the standard protocol (87.68).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Most participants were located in Jamaica, so the findings may not fully apply to diasporic communities where language use patterns differ. The methods, particularly using adult community models for scoring, are time-consuming and may not be feasible in all clinical settings. Data collection occurred in schools during operational hours, leading to some incomplete data and environmental noise. The study did not directly survey clinicians' experiences with implementing these culturally responsive methods.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and an Endowment Gift Fund to the Jamaican Creole Language Project. The authors declared no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that adapting scoring to accept dialectal variations will lead to underdiagnosis of true disorders. The study found that using a two-sourced approach (parent and teacher/SLP concern) alongside adapted scoring maintained high classification accuracy (93.8%) and sensitivity, suggesting that overdiagnosis was reduced without increasing false negatives.