5 tips to improve social interaction assessments for teenagers with communication challenges
The big picture:
Almost all speech pathologists know that standardised language testing isn’t enough to get to the bottom of a teenager’s real world social communication challenges.
Challenges:
- Families and speech pathologists are constrained by time, assessment tools, tightening funding rules, and cost of living pressures.
- Most clients and families prefer to spend limited speech pathology time working on useful communication skills and goals, rather than undergoing tests.
Support:
Luckily for us, groups of researchers understand the challenges and are working hard to help us to tackle them. One leading group has looked recently at what’s around and highlighted five practical things speech pathologists can do to improve assessments for teenagers with communication challenges (see citation below):
- Ask the teenager more about their skills, challenges and goals! Interview and ask them to self-rate their social communication skills and challenges.
- Find out as much as you can about the teenager’s real world participation – how the teenager actually performs in real world interactions, as well as skills the teenager needs (or will need) to take part in home, school, work, extra-curricular and community activities.
- Test functional discourse level-skills, including the teenager’s abilities to explain things, and to retell stories.
- Assess writing skills, including persuasive writing skills.
- Factor in teenagers’ cognitive abilities and challenges, including attention, learning, memory and inhibitory control when planning therapy and providing other support to families, educators and other professionals supporting the teenager.
Bottom line:
To improve social use of language assessments, we need co-designed, practical participation-based assessments that focus on client-reported outcomes. But this will take time. In the meantime, these tips help speech pathologists plan and deliver higher quality, useful assessments for teenagers with communication challenges.
Go deeper:
Shelton, N., Munro, N., Starling, J., Tieu, L., & Keep, M. (2025). Assessment of the Social Interaction Abilities of Adolescents With Communication Disability: A Scoping Review. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 56(4), 1296-1311. (Abstract Only)
Related reading from us:
What is functional communication? How can we assess, measure, and improve it?
The ultimate goal of speech therapy is not perfect articulation or grammar
To help teenagers with language challenges, we need to go beyond words and sentences
Focusing speech therapy on functional outcomes: a refresher
How to help a disorganised student: some practical ideas and resources
This article also appears in a recent issue of Banter Booster, our weekly round up of the best speech pathology ideas and practice tips for busy speech pathologists, speech pathology students, teachers and others.
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Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.
Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language
Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.
