The Data Sheet

Out all of the things that I am continually trying to perfect there is nothing more puzzling than my data sheet! Now in my second year of grad school I have gone through about 10 different designs to make collecting data easy and efficient. Nevertheless, there is that "something" missing inevitably forcing me to fill the empty white border with scribbles of pluses and minuses. 

If I were to pinpoint what is puzzling about data sheets I would say it's the inability to capture the complexity of speech and language in the form of a checkmark. In an ideal world, I would record language samples of all of my clients and analyze them to ensure that my treatment methods are in fact working! Now, I know this is too good to be true :) but if I could create a way to effectively capture enough information to create a snapshot I would be thrilled. 

Throughout my quest to find the perfect data sheet I came to the conclusion that maybe it's not a question of making THE perfect data sheet...but making several! In the past few weeks, I have designed two data sheets that are capturing that snapshot for my needs. My goal is to create an ongoing library of data sheets that can be adapted and tailored to each client and target. That library is still being built however in the mean time here are the two data sheets I talked about!

The Data Sheets

Multi-goal Data Sheet 
Click here for my Multi-goal data sheet.

• I created this data sheet to tackle multiple goals for the same client! The prompts section you will find has a lot of symbols - I use the symbols as my short cut for different prompts I give to the student: 
• +: no prompts (either self-correction or spontaneous)
• AH: Acoustic highlighting
• M: Direct model
• DM: Delayed model
• Hourglass: wait time
• Arrows up and down: breakdown buildup
• Lighting arrow down: simplified task
• Hand drawing: written cues
• Flower: visual cues

Drill Collection Data Sheet
Click here for my Drill Collection data sheet

• I created this data sheet to collect data for those drill tasks! I simply write the intended target (word, phrase, sentence) on the left column and keep track over the course of the week of their progress! 

There you have it! Hopefully my library of data sheets will soon fill up with reliable ways of collecting client's data. I'll keep updating about my adventures to conquer the missing "something" on my data sheets.

Speak. Listen. Sparkle!
L