Today was Cathie Matthews' endorsement of candidature for her MPhil research titled: “Supporting 2-year-olds’ communication: Collaborations between rural health professionals and early childhood education services”
- Chair - Dr James Deehan
- Supervisors – Professor Sharynne McLeod, Professor Julian Grant and Associate Professor Elizabeth Murray
- Reviewers – Associate Professor Sarah Verdon and Dr Suzanne Hopf
Thursday the 11th of April (12:00pm to 2:00pm)
Here is her abstract:
Early identification of communication delay is important to increase the likelihood of children communicating successfully now and, in the future, and to reduce the risk of poorer outcomes in literacy, academic success, social-emotional wellbeing, and employment. The current quantitative study sought to assess the feasibility of the Early Communication Measures (ECM) to identify communication risk in 48 2-year-old children by eight early childhood educators, eight child and family health nurses, and 48 caregivers. The Early Communication Measures comprised the Early Language Identification Measure-Shortened (ELIM-S) and the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS). The Early Communication Measures was found to be feasible and acceptable to monitor 2-year-old children’s communication development. Feasability (Bowen et al., 2009) and acceptability (Sekhon et al., 2017) frameworks were used to consider feasibility constructs such as demand, acceptability, expansion, and preliminary outcomes; and acceptability constructs such as affective attitude, burden, ethicality, intervention coherence, opportunity costs, perceived effectiveness, self-efficacy. Following the ECM almost half of the caregivers (43.5%) were recommended that their child should see a speech-language pathologist for further assessment and almost a third (30.4%) were referred to other local service and resources to support their child’s development. It promoted early and appropriate referrals for speech-language pathology assessments and provided more detail for staff compared to standard monitoring practices. This research supports interdisciplinary collaborative practices for early identification of young children’s communication development risk.
Congratulations Cathie!
