CeTasSSD data entry into Phon

Felicity Laurence and Emma Scanlon are working on entering all of the 2026 data from just over 900 students into Phon. We appreciate the input from Prof Yvan Rose to tweak some of the program for our Australian context.

 

Launch of Phon 4

Congratulations to Yvan Rose and Greg Hedlund and team who launched Phon 4 today (their Thursday 16th April - our Friday 17th April).

https://www.phon.ca/phon-manual/getting_started.html 

Our CeTasSSD team were very honoured to work with Yvan to install and begin using Phon 4 on its first day of release. Yvan has been very generous preparing our speech sample and teaching us how to use it effectively to analyse the data we have collected from our Tasmanian Speech Census.

Helen, Sharynne, Emma, Felicity, Yvan, Ally - meeting #2

Yvan, Emma, Helen, Felicity, Sharynne  - meeting #1

CET Speech Census - Last week

We are working hard to finalise our CET speech census this week before the children all go on school holidays. We have just over 1000 consent forms returned. I have entered data for 733 assessments - but our team has done more than this (yay team!). I entered the data Ally gave me this afternoon for another 46 assessments. Helen did over 30 today (I haven't entered these yet). What an amazing team - and incredible children and teaching staff.

Ally and Sharynne heading to The Nest in The Treehouse for more data collection with the children

Sharynne, Ally Barrett and Emma Scanlon 
at the end of a big day assessing wonderful children

Assessing children's speech in Tasmania

I am in Tasmania this week to assess children's speech across the state as part of our research grant with Catholic Education Tasmania. It is wonderful to visit schools with Felicity Laurence and Lisa Johnson.

This is a really important study. One of the speech assistants aptly named this phase of the research the "CET speech census".

We currently have 785 consent forms and ICS data through Qualitrix. 

Some of the unique experiences from this week:

• Monday and Tuesday - Assessing 53 children across 4 different schools using the International Speech Screen (and some with the DEAP Screener) 
• A baby deer was shown to the children in the classroom we were visiting (very tiny and cute!)
• One child came three times to be assessed (he took his sticker off so we didn't remember he had been assessed before)
• Our treehouse speech sound poster (McLeod & Crowe, 2018) was on the speech room wall at one of the schools
• Tuesday - Negotiating the rain as we walked with children from their classrooms to the allocated research space
• Undertaking research in an art room 
• Enthusiastic children wanting it to be their turn :) 

Sharynne and Felicity ready for a day with Kinder children in Hobart

Sharynne  and Kate's treehouse poster was on the wall in the speech room at a school!

Sharynne and Lisa in the rain

Sharynne  and Lisa about to meet the next group of 4-year-olds

We also met with the private speech pathologists who assess CET children as part of the research on Wednesday morning