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Photo credit: Ben Earwicker, Garrison Photography, Boise, ID www.garrisonphoto.org A remarkable schism is developing between audiologists in the UK and the USA on the topic of auditory processing disorder (APD) in children. In 2010, the American Academy of Audiology published clinical practice guidelines for auditory processing disorder .  In 2011, the British Society of Audiology published a position statement on the same topic, which came to rather different conclusions. This month a White Paper by the British Society of Audiology appeared reaffirming their position alongside invited commentaries. So what is all the fuss about? The argument centres on how to diagnose APD in children. Most of the tests used in the USA to identify APD involve responding to speech. One of the most widely-used assessments is the SCAN-C battery which has four subtests: Filtered words: Repeat words that have been low-pass filtered, so they sound muffled Auditory figure-ground: Repeat words that are p...

The new phonics screening test for children has been highly controversial.   I’ve been surprised at the amount of hostility engendered by the idea of testing children’s knowledge of how letters and sounds go together. There’s plenty of evidence that this is a foundational skill for reading, and poor ability to do phonics is a good predictor of later reading problems. So while I can see there are aspects of the implementation of the phonics screen that could be improved,   I don’t buy arguments that it will ‘confuse’ children, or prevent them reading for meaning. I discovered today that some early data on the phonics screen had recently been published by the Department for Education , and my inner nerd was immediately stimulated to visit the website and download the tables.   What I found was both surprising and disturbing. Most of the results are presented in terms of proportions of children ‘passing’ the screen, i.e. scoring 32 or more. There are tables showing how ...