Assessing Inference Making in Listening Comprehension in Children in Special Education

Assessing Inference Making in Listening Comprehension in Children in Special Education

Rebecca Hindle

2018

Successful listening comprehension involves making accurate inferences to interpret the meaning of a story. We assessed inference making in listening comprehension of children in special education in years 4, 5, and 6 (n=12). Children listened to short stories and answered questions to assess local and global coherence inference after each story. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no significant main effects for children’s first responses for presentation type (whole, segmented) and inference type (local, global). However, after children had received prompts a significant main effect of inference type was shown with children performing better on global than local coherence inferences. Correlational analysis revealed no significant correlations between IQ and inference type but there was a stronger correlation between verbal IQ and inference type than non-verbal IQ and inference type. An independent t-test revealed no significant effect of diagnostic group on IQ or inference type but children in the Autism group performed better than children in the MLD group on both IQ measures and the MLD group scored better on both inference types. We conclude that inference type is important to consider when setting and asking comprehension questions along with the use of prompts to portray and assess children’s full comprehension ability.

Developmental Disorders

Participants
The participants were 12 children from years 4, 5 and 6 aged between 8 and 11 (N=12, 3 girls and 9 boys, M=9.67, SD=0.99) from a special needs school in the North West of England. All children had a statement of special educational needs including; Autism, Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, Moderate Learning Disability, Nonans Syndrome, Fetal Vulprate Syndrome and Speech and Language Impairment. All children were verbal with English as their first language. Consent was provided by parents/ carers, the Head of School and each class Teacher.
Measures
IQ Task
The WISC IV was used to determine children’s IQ levels. Children completed one verbal and one non-verbal measure of IQ. The verbal measure was a vocabulary task, children were first shown pictures of items and asked what this is, progressing onto words asking, what does this mean? Children could score either 0, 1 or 2 points depending on the accuracy of their definitions according to the WISC IV manual. There were 36 items, increasing in difficulty, and testing stopped when children answered 5 questions incorrectly in a row. The non-verbal measure was a block design task, this comprised of 14 items starting with simple designs progressing to more difficult designs. Children had to copy patterns either demonstrated by the experimenter for the first 3 patterns or presented in picture format for the following items. There were time constraints for each pattern starting with 30s progressing in length for the more difficult items to 120s. Once children had failed to complete 3 patterns in a row, testing ended.
Listening comprehension task
The listening comprehension task was taken from Freed and Cain (2016) devised by the Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC) (2015). The full set of materials comprised 6 short stories however, for the current study only 4 stories were used: Grandma’s Birthday, The Game, New Pet and A Family Day Out. The stories were all topics appropriate to this age group. There were 8 questions paired with each story assessing both local and global coherence inferences; 4 of each. With questions either asked throughout the stories (segmented format) or at the end of the stories (whole format). In 2 of the sessions, stories were presented in a whole format and in the other 2 sessions, the stories were presented in a segmented format. All the stories were pre-recorded by Freed and Cain (2016) and delivered on PowerPoint presentation on the researcher’s laptop to ensure consistent delivery of the stories regarding pace and word emphasis. All stories were available in a whole and a segmented format. The format in which children listened to the stories was counterbalanced based on children’s IQ levels from low to high.
• Whole story format. Children listened to the full story and at the end were asked 8 comprehension questions. The delivery of each whole formatted story followed the same format.
• Segmented story format. Children listened to the story in 5 segments. After each segment the child was asked either 1 or 2 questions with 8 questions in total. The delivery of each segmented story followed the same format.
The average length of the story was 157 words, there were no pictures included in the PowerPoint which the story recordings were presented on. This was to avoid children using the pictures to help them answer the questions. Children were provided with verbal prompts if incomplete answers were given to direct them to the correct answer. If children were still unable to answer full knowledge checks were provided, see Table 1. All prompts were pre-written to ensure all children received the same level of prompting.
Procedure
Pre-test
The IQ assessments were implemented individually in a quiet room in two separate sessions. Each session lasted between 10 and 15 minutes depending on how many questions/ trials they completed. First children completed the vocabulary test then in a separate session completed the non-verbal measure, block design.
Main assessment
Children were presented with 4 short stories on 4 separate occasions, each story paired with 8 questions. Each story had to be completed in a separate session due to the attention and engagement levels of the children being tested. Each session lasted approximately 10 minutes depending on children’s accuracy and speed of answering. The procedure was explained to the children at the beginning of each session using a script to ensure consistency. They were informed that they would either be asked questions throughout the story or at the end of the story.

Lancaster University

Data/SPSS.sav

Hindle2018

Ellie Ball

Open

None

English

Data

La1 4YF

Professor Kate Cain

MSc

Developmental Psychology

12 Participants (9 boys and 3 girls- aged between 4-11)

ANOVA
t-test
Correlation