Criteria for assessing therapy outcome in speech pathology and audiology

Speech pathologists and audiologists function as both producers and consumers of information concerning therapy outcome. In both roles they have to know the questions that need to be answered to adequately evaluate a therapy method and the factors that have to be considered when interpreting answers to such questions. An approach (in the form of a work sheet) is described here that can be used for both identifying and systematically evaluating the validity, reliability, and generality of information regarding impacts of therapy methods on persons who have communicative disorders and for identifying additional information needed to complete such an evaluation. The approach is used to assess the impacts of a therapy method.