Blog 4: Prognosis

At my outplacement at Cheat Lake Elementary I am lucky enough to have a very supportive supervisor who is interested in giving me as much experience as possible. Thus, when it came time to write a new IEP and conduct an IEP meeting with a parent of a child who will begin receiving speech services, she talked me through the paperwork and the process ahead of time, then simply sat in as I ran the meeting.

During the meeting, the parent had several good questions about both the therapy itself, the process, and what kind of progress she could expect to see in her son. When she asked about his prognosis, I told her that as the sounds he had acquired were very stable, and the sounds he had in error were being produced inconsistently, this was a good prognostic indicator for his success. I told her we expected to see fast progress with his speech.

This article supports the use of a child's error consistency index as a prognostic indicator; that is, the more inconsistent the errors, the better the prognosis with intervention.

Tyler, A.A., Lewis, K.E., & Welch, C.M. (2003). Predictors of phonological change following intervention. American Journal Of Speech-Language Pathology. 12, 289-98.