Speech Delay or Not Again?

This morning, Ry had a developmental evaluation by a team of 3 young ladies from the Cambridge-Somerville Early Intervention referred by his pediatrician. We had scheduled for this evaluation since Ry's 24 month old doctor visit and it took 3 months long before it is done after much rescheduling. Since this is a free service, I am not complaining much.

As usual, Ry is pretty alright playing with strangers at home due to the constant visits that he had been getting from the Home-based Learning Program each week and the occasional visits by the Cambridge social worker who come by to check on my pregnancy previously and now, the development of baby Br. So, while doing the evaluation today, Ry thought it was the usual play time with the home-based visitor and he totally did not need my intervention at all, which was good so that the results would be actually more authentic and more reflective of his abilities.

Why does the evaluation need 3 persons? Basically, 1 lady is in charge of testing the subject (i.e. Ry in this case), 1 lady is in charge of quantitatively scoring and the last lady is in charge of observing and recording the results qualitatively. This is definitely very professional in my opinion, especially that I have done courses in my ME.d program on program evaluation and learnt that the most powerful form of any evaluation is to combine both quantitative and qualitative methods. To be honest, I am totally surprised by the professionalism displayed even though this is a free service. Even back in SG, I have found that many evaluations or educational research done do not usually employ such high degree of standards.

So, what do the evaluation encompass? The evaluation is divided into a few sections like gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, understanding, language and social skills. So, the tester would bring out toys liks pegs and blocks and see whether Ry knows how to stack them or arrange them. For problem solving, they would bring out puzzles and see whether Ry knows how to solve them or they would ask Ry to sort shapes or colours. The tester also ask Ry to jump, hop and balance on beam to see his gross motor skills. For speech, they test his understanding of instructions and vocabulary by asking him to point to pictures and finally observe how he speaks. Some of the questions were directed at me like how he interact with other kids and how many words he speaks et cetra.

The whole evaluation approximately took about 1 hour long. At the end, they gave me a breakdown of the quantitative scoring and the results reflected that Ry was more advanced in his fine motor and problem solving skills at 29 months instead of his current age at 27 months. He was on par with his age group on his other areas except in speech and language, he's diagnosed to be only at 17 months, meaning that he is delayed by 10 months. This means that he is eligible for services from Early Intervention like speech therapy once a week since he is lagging behind more than 30%. They also made the observation that Ry tends to make noises with his mouth closed and he is quiet generally. This is also in congurence with my own observations as I often have trouble getting Ry to open his mouth to talk. They also suggested that his brain may be too busy developing his other areas of abilities that language and speech take a backseat. So now, Ry is officially declared having speech delay. Since he is 10 months behind his peers, my hope is that he would be able to speak by 3 years old before he goes to childcare/preschool when we are back in SG!