Resources: CSD & Statistics

I've been at the University of South Carolina in the Communication Sciences & Disorders department for about 10 months now. It's been a good year made better by amazing colleagues and great students. Columbia also has turned out to be an incredible place to do educational research, especially focusing on children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds!

I've been fortunate in that it's been easy to stay connected with friends from Florida State (many of whom have now moved elsewhere) as we've been wrapping up some papers, including one that focused on the sentence repetition task of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (Pena et al., 2014). Check out the citation and link to full paper at the bottom of this post. 

I wanted to share some resources pulled together by my academic sister Dr. Autumn McIlraith (currently at the University of Houston, previously my office mate). We were both part of the last PIRT cohort at Florida State - our first three years at FSU were funded by an interdisciplinary training grant supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (more info about that here). During our PIRT experience, the importance of methodology, appropriate statistics, and construct validity was instilled in us thanks to Drs. Chris Lonigan and Chris Schatschneider. We both have since made methodology and statistics a focal component of our work and are constantly thinking of different ways to share this focus with our colleagues and fellow CSD researchers. We've talked about methods and statistics at the last few ASHA conventions (listed here) and Autumn has compiled a list of some of her favorite resources since she started working at the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics under Dr. David Francis's mentorship. Her long list of helpful links includes general introductory resources, information about power, effect sizes, and linear modeling, resources to get started in R statistical software, teaching resources, and data visualization information. Highly recommend checking those out when you have time. Also - if you have any favorite resources that you think belong on the list, please let us know! We are always seeking out new resources and know that there are plenty of things out there designed to make applied researchers' lives easier. 

​Fitton, L., Hoge, R., Petscher, Y., & Wood, C. (2019). Psychometric evaluation of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment Sentence Repetition task for clinical decision-making. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-18-0354

• View the final, accepted version of the manuscript here. Abstract below.

Abstract: 
Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish–English speaking children's sentence repetition and vocabulary performance.
Method: Participants were 291 Spanish–English speaking children in kindergarten and 1st grade. Item analyses were used to evaluate the underlying factor structure for each language version of the sentence repetition tasks of the BESA. The tasks were then examined in relation to a measure of English receptive vocabulary.
Results: Bifactor models, which include a single underlying general factor and multiple specific factors, provided the best overall model fit for both the Spanish and English versions of the task. There was no relation between children's overall Spanish sentence repetition performance and their English vocabulary. However, children's pronoun, noun phrase, and verb phrase item scores in Spanish significantly predicted their English vocabulary scores. For English sentence repetition, both children's overall performance and their specific performance on the noun phrase items were predictors of their English vocabulary scores. Follow-up analyses revealed that, for the purposes of clinical assessment, the BESA sentence repetition tasks can be considered essentially unidimensional, lending support to the current scoring structure of the test.
Conclusions: Study findings suggest that sentence repetition tasks can provide insight into Spanish–English speaking children's vocabulary skills in addition to their morphosyntactic skills when used on a broad research scale. From a clinical assessment perspective, results indicate that the sentence repetition task has strong internal validity and support to the use of this measure in clinical practice.