Research Symposium

BIO

Karis Matheson is a Behavioral Neuroscience major at Florida State University assisting in research in the School of Communication Science and Disorders. Her current research project she is assisting on is studying the collaboration of speech-language pathologists and kindergarten teachers, and she aims to continue research in her time at FSU.

Collaboration Between Speech-Language Pathologists and Kindergarten Teachers

Abstract

Collaboration between speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and kindergarten (K) teachers benefits kindergarten students who may have academic and/or social concerns, and specifically those with diagnosed speech-language impairment (SLI). Students with SLI are at risk for later difficulty in reading and language-based math skills (Adlof & Hogan, 2018; Cabbage et al., 2018, Cross et al., 2019). The present study aims to provide a descriptive analysis of views regarding collaboration between SLPs and kindergarten teachers. We hypothesize that there will be similar collaboration ratings between the two groups but anticipate that SLPs will place a slightly greater emphasis on collaboration compared to K teachers. First, a cross-sectional survey was deployed to collect demographic information as well as ratings of  collaboration for SLPs and K teachers. Dyads (SLP/K teacher) were then created for qualitative interviews and analyses. Even though our data collection is not yet complete, we collected data from 47 K teachers and 133 SLPs and a total of 171 responses.  We anticipate concluding that both groups will have similar views in terms of their future collaboration.

Keywords: Speech-Language Pathologists, Collaboration, Kindergarten Teachers