This text-based course is a written transcript of recorded course, “Using the New PLS-5: Administration and Interpretation”, presented by Nancy Castilleja.
Communication access realtime translation (cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be totally verbatim. The consumer should check with the moderator for any clarifications of the material.
>> Amy Hansen: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this e-learning Expert e-Seminar series entitled, “Preschool Language Scales-5: Assessing Language from 0-7.” We are pleased to have our presenter with us this afternoon, Nancy Castilleja. My name is Amy Hansen and I will be your moderator for today's online course. Today's presentation is a product education seminar co-sponsored with Pearson. Pearson provides education in the broadest sense of the word, and aims to help people make progress in their lives through education and information to help them learn and live.
At this time, it is very much a pleasure and an honor to introduce Nancy Castilleja. Nancy is Senior Product Manager for speech and language products at Pearson Assessment. Prior to this role, Nancy developed many assessments with the Psychological Corporation and Harcourt Assessment, including PLS-English and Spanish editions, Boehm-3 and CELF-4 Spanish edition. Nancy has 8 years of clinical experience working with infants, school age children, adolescents and adults in school and community settings. She has presented at many state and national conferences on early childhood assessment and bilingual assessment issues. So welcome, Nancy, and thank you so much for joining us today
>> Nancy Castilleja: Thank you, Amy. Today's webinar is an overview of the Preschool Language Scales that was just recently published in April, 2011. PLS was first published in 1969, and the PLS-4 has been out since 2002, just to give you some perspective about how long the test has been around and how much research over the years has been done with it. The original test was put together through the collaboration of three different authors: Irla Lee Zimmerman is a clinical psychologist who had specialized in working with young children, Violette Steiner was an early childhood educator, and Roberta Pond is a speech-language pathologist. All three of them met when they worked at a HeadStart setting many years ago. The authors developed this test as a measure of developmental language skills that are critical to preschool and early school success; that was the initial driver for developing this test. Though over the years in the last few revisions, it's become much more of a speech pathologist tool, and you see that influence in the test items with each additional revision. There are three course objectives that you'll be paying attention to in order to pass the test at the end of this session. You should be able to:
- Describe two changes in the PLS-5 administration rules
- Identify three test items new to PLS-5
- Identify two ways that cultural-linguistic differences were addressed in the development of PLS-5.
PLS is an assessment that is used to identify very young children (ages birth to 7:11) who have a language delay or disorder. The age range was extended to age 7 so that you're able to obtain standard scores for seven-year-olds who have a moderate to severe language disorder, such as children with autism or developmental delays whose communication skills are very much like those of a young child.
