Hooray for critical thinking skills

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I was in my clinic class today (I'm in school for speech pathology), which is run by two licensed speech pathologists, and we were talking about standardized testing. As an example of why you need to be careful when interpreting standardized test scores, one of the two women told us about this girl with Asperger's she had tested once. She knew this girl had a fabulous vocabulary, but she bombed the vocabulary section of (some speech/language test) because the sentences she created using the given vocabulary words had nothing to do with the picture she was supposed to be describing. This girl knew the words- she just had trouble with the task. So although this clinician had to report her actual terrible score as it was, she was careful to explain the situation and provide an explanation stating that the test score was not representative of this girl's vocabulary. Since I know some people here have gotten screwed on IQ tests and other standardized exams, I just thought you guys might appreciate hearing that some clinicians *do* actually use their brains when it comes to test interpretation. Hopefully this will become a trend.

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting..

Thanks for the post.

I am an Australian physiotherapist (in US I think we're known as Physical Therapists).

I believe it takes many years for many health professionals to actually use their brains. I shake my head at the comments some of the students and new graduate physiotherapists come up with.

I believe the current problem in health is everything is so focused on 'evidence-based'. But what about common sense, intuition and experience? And if everything needs to be evidence-based, how will any new treatments come about?

I'll stop or I'll get into a long rant!

Helen

What else would you use wishful thinking evidence-based is not a dirty phase and you know it. Most of the rest of the medical worlds use what works and know why it works and so sould you a doc of the mind/brain. You use the evidence you see make a call with what you have been taught and yes guess sometimes. whining about having to have something to back it up makes you sounds like a quack. common sense, intuition and experience are based on evidence hello sorry if i sound annoyed but get a clue.

Well, I tend to think that evidence-based practice is a good thing, especially when it is applied to intervention (which it usually is). For instance, oral-motor activities (ex. tongue exercises) are frequently used in speech pathology when working with articulation clients (like kids, for instance). However, there have been a number of research studies done that found that oral-motor activities do not actually help with speech motor movements. Therefore, evidence-based practice would suggest that oral-motor activities should not be used with articulation clients, and treatment should target articulation directly. Many clinicians resist this however because it contradicts what they are used to doing.

The problem with drawing conclusions about treatment without a rigorously controlled study is that you can't separate out the effects of intervention, maturation, or other influences on the child's language. So clinicians who work on oral-motor activities in conjunction with more strictly speech activities may see improvement in their clients and therefore assume that oral-motor is effective, when they actually have no real basis to make that judgment because they can't tell *what* is causing the improvement.

The current problems with evidence-based practice, in my opinion, are (1) lack of research in some areas, (2) lack of dissemination of information to clinicians. Ideally, if something seems intuitive, it should be researched so that accurate information about its efficacy can be shared.

I'm sure that there are a number of studies out there with results showing that standardized tests often do not evaluate the abilities of autistics accurately. However, the odds are that most practicing speech pathologists who are not involved in research do not eagerly page through their journals every month, looking for new research studies to apply to their clients. From what I've heard from people in my department, many clinicians are more passive- they attend conventions and wait for researchers to spoon-feed them practical applications of their data. I think clinicians need to be more active in keeping up with current research and with interpreting research as it applies to their practice.

That's not to say that intuition and common sense should be ignored, nor that unconventional techniques should not be used with clients on an individual basis. Because sometimes, you do discover something that does wonders for a particular client. But it is ideal if your usual practices have some grounding in established theory.

I recently sat 2 tests as part of a job interview.I did well in the 'critical reasoning'
test but struggled with the 'numerical' test. One of the reasons I think I performed below par was due to the fact that the numerical test had a stricter
time deadline and that day my watch battery had run out.Of course,there wasn't
a clock to be seen in the exam room and everyone else had watches so I
got flustered and didn't do myself justice. I wonder if psychologists take into
account people whose watches have stopped during time-sensitive exams !

I just overheard teachers the other day talking about how a kindergarten boy knew all of the sounds for the letters, but yet couldn't write the letter that his name began with. That apparently is supposed to be impossible

Was it that he didn't know which letter it was, or that he couldn't write it? HECK, a lot of ADULTS can't write their name. I mean they write in a way that is VERY illegible!

Heck, my own abilities vary widely. I have a GREAT episopdic memory, and am logical, etc... Yet my math skills and temporary memory could certainly be better. A person on here that I still haven't personally met, but consider a friend all the same, turned me onto a bunch of formulas. I could do some calculations fast and easy while others that seem so much easier take more time.

My ability with computers is much the same. I don't think my school tried to teach kids to read until about 1st grade(Though I learned over 2 years earlier)!