The effect of stuttering measurement training on judging stuttering occurrence in preschool children who stutter

To evaluate the efficacy of a standardized training program to improve preschool teachers' ability to identify occurrences of stuttering accurately and reliably in preschool children who stutter (CWS).

An Icelandic version of the Stuttering Measurement Assessment and Training (SMAAT) program [Ingham, R. J., Cordes, A. K., Kilgo, M., & Moglia, R. (1998). Stuttering measurement assessment and training (SMAAT). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara] was developed using 2-min audio-visual recordings of nine Icelandic-speaking CWS (3-5 years). Twenty preschool teachers from preschools in Iceland volunteered to participate and were randomly allocated to an experimental and control group. The preschool teachers judged stuttering on nine pre-judged, interval-classified speech samples on two occasions 2-3 weeks apart; only the experimental group received judgment training between Occasion 1 and 2.

The experimental and control groups displayed, on average, above 80% accuracy in identifying stuttering in the sampled CWS, even prior to training. After training the experimental group showed significantly higher mean percent judgment accuracy (p<.01), while the control group's mean accuracy level showed no significant difference between Occasion 1 and 2.

The interval-based training program did improve the accuracy with which the judges identified stuttering in preschool CWS. However, the findings also showed that the preschool teachers possessed relatively satisfactory stuttering judgment skills, even without training.

The reader will be able to (a) explain the development of a procedure for establishing standardized training material for measuring and identifying stuttering in preschool children, (b) evaluate whether preschool teachers are generally accurate judges of stuttering in young children, and (c) describe how their stuttering judgment accuracy can be improved through training.