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Pierson, Stephen M.

Communication Sciences

2004

M.S.

Over the past two decades, interest in the area of communicative competence has been gaining consideration. Though several communication observation scales have been created over the years, none have specifically utilized teachers to evaluate students in grades 1-5. In 1998, Ann Rita Dancoes, B.S., Rebecca McCauley, Ph.D., and Barry Guitar, Ph.D. developed the Teacher's Assessment of Communicative Competence (TASCC) to determine the speech, language, and pragmatic communication abilities of children in grades 1-5. The present study was designed to determine the reliability and validity of the TASCC in determining differences between the communicative competence of children who do and do not stutter. The three hypotheses that were tested in this research were: (1) The TASCC scores will be significantly poorer for stuttering versus fluent students (2) For students who stutter, stuttering severity ratings will be negatively correlated with their TASCC scores. (3) There will be no relation between the number of stuttering students taught by teachers and stuttering/fluent students' TASCC score differences. If a relationship is found, it will be used as a covariate for later analysis.
This study included 8 teachers who assessed pair-matched (grade, gender, academic performance, English as the primary language, and age) stuttering students with fluent students using the TASCC, and each stuttering student was evaluated for stuttering severity. A statistically significant difference was found where stutterers had less communicative competence than fluent students. No significant correlation was found between the severity of each stuttering student's fluency and their TASCC score. There was no significant correlation between the amount of experience teachers had with stuttering students and the difference in TASCC scores between stuttering and fluent students.