The Auditory Skills Assessment
(ASA) provides you with a tool for early identification of young children who might be at risk for auditory skill deficits and/or early literacy skill difficulties. Developed by Dr. Donna Geffner and Dr. Ronald Goldman, this screener provides accurate, developmentally based results to help you determine which children may need follow-up, intervention, or further evaluation.
Features & Benefits
The ASA is designed to be a quick, reliable indicator of a young child's auditory skills and includes the following features:
- Unscored practice items provide opportunity to teach the tasks
- Individual, untimed administration and scoring procedures that are quick, easy, and objective
- No required reading or written responses
- Large, full-color illustrations tested to appeal to young children
- An indicator of performance (high, average, low) by domain to pinpoint further assessment or intervention needs
- Case studies highlighted in the manual for supported use of the ASA Researched validity and reliability
The ASA offers the following benefits:
- Assesses auditory skills critical to the development of oral and written language skills
- Offers the youngest age range in a published auditory skills screening and can provide an early warning indicator
- Reflects best practices in behaviorally based auditory screening
- Serves as a low tech, friendly screener for young children, that doesn't require headphones or an audiometer (a Stimulus CD is used to present stimuli)
- Helps point you in the right direction by providing an indicator of performance across each domain on the ASA, which may indicate a need for further follow-up evaluation, immediate intervention/instruction in auditory skills, or re-screening
Psychometric Information
Over 600 children were tested to define cut scores that would best discriminate clinical cases from non-clinical cases and to study the final screener's reliability, validity, and clinical utility.
ASA research included:
- Qualitative reviews and empirical analyses to maximize fairness for individuals from different groups (by sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geographic region)
- A standardization sample of children ages 3:6–6:11 whose primary language (most frequently spoken language) was English, who had normal vision with or without corrective aids, and were free of upper respiratory problems or ear infections at the time of testing
- The requirement that all children in the standardization and clinical samples could pass a pure tone hearing screening at 20 db HL at 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz in both ears within one week prior to ASA testing, to ensure hearing acuity of the participants
Users & Applications:
- Early identification and intervention
- Universal screening
- Progress monitoring
Content & Administration
Speech Discrimination Domain
- Section 1: Speech Discrimination in Noise—Discriminate words spoken against a background of conversational noise
- Section 2: Mimicry—Repeat a spoken nonsense word
Phonological Awareness Domain
- Section 3: Blending—Recognize or say a word after hearing its syllables or phonemes spoken in parts
- Section 4: Rhyming—Indicate if two spoken words rhyme
Nonspeech Processing Domain
- Section 5: Tonal Discrimination—Indicate if two musical tones are from the same instrument
- Section 6: Tonal Patterning—Indicate which of two musical tones was presented last
Try the ASA Interactive Demo!
Try out the new Auditory Skills Assessment! Click the image below to try an interactive demo of the ASA from renowned authors Dr. Donna Geffner and Dr. Ronald Goldman.
In order to run the demo, you'll need Flash installed. If you don't have it, you can get it at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
In this demo, you'll complete two practice items for each of the six sections of ASA. Please note that while this interactive demo is intended to give you a feel for how the screener flows, it's not an exact representation of the actual product.
Note: Don't forget to check your speakers or headphones and turn your volume up.
