Using a scoring template to identify intervention goals for adolescent social communication interventions

Social communication is a critical skill for adolescents at risk for communication disorders as they transition from compulsory education to adult contexts. Identifying intervention goals that are well tailored to the individual requires information from assessments that 1) describe the examinee's present level of social communication ability and 2) identify skills that are just beyond the examinee's current ability level that may challenge the examinee.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of a new assessment of social communication for adolescents, and to explore whether a Rasch keyform - a scoring template that links an examinee's overall ability to their scores on individual instrument items-provides an interpretable assessment output for intervention goal selection.

The new Transition Pragmatics Interview (TPI; Poll et al., 2024) was administered to 109 adolescents (14 to 21 years) of varied social communication abilities. Data were analyzed using Rasch analysis to evaluate the psychometrics of the TPI. Keyform displays for employment-related TPI items were generated for three participants at different levels of ability.

Analyses supported the TPI as a unidimensional and reliable scale. Keyform displays facilitated the identification of transition zones for each of the three exemplar respondents. Transition zones are item sets at difficulty levels associated with emerging participant abilities.

TPI keyforms detailed the present level of participant ability and identified items which would be the next most challenging. Data from three exemplar respondents were reviewed in order to show how keyforms could provide information to identify appropriate social communication intervention goals when combined with the examinee's career goals, academic standards, and industry standards for social communication.