Auditory Processing Assessment: Understanding it at the Three Basic Levels

There are several cases where any form of auditory deficit in the child is generally overlooked or underestimated by the parents. Lack of proper guidance and parental negligence as well as lack of concern on the part of teachers can actually aggravate the problem further. There are generally points at which the brain, the auditory nerves and the auditory organs do not work under the proper stimulation, thus resulting into deficit of several kinds.

Understanding auditory processing assessment at different levels:

The CAPD or the Central Auditory Processing Assessment is conducted through the use of some special tests which diagnose and examine the different auditory functions that are carried out by the brain and the entire cranial system. These tests are often divided into smaller sub-categories like:

• Mon-aural low redundancy speech tests
• Dichotic speech tests
• Temporal patterning sets and
• Binaural interaction tests.

Certified and experienced audiologists are the best suited for these kind of tests. Proper auditory training and slight modifications done to the environment can actually help learner to understand CAPD and rectify themselves under the guidance of an able instructor.

The MAPA or the Multiple Auditory Processing Assessment in children:

Among several processes to understand auditory processing assessment, the MAPA or the Multiple Auditory Processing Assessment has been developed to understand severe form of auditory disorders into those patients whose problem started at 8 years and thereafter continued till their adulthood. This entire process incorporates a hybrid form of testing approach, including all those tests which require clinical intervention. It is always performed by a team of professionals, like audiologist, speech-language pathologist, special educators and psychologists etc. after the initial diagnosis of the problem, the professionals are allowed to diagnose further and go for proper medication and implementation of remedial programs. Along with the assessment procedure, in addition to certain behavioral tests, special educators also discuss the following:

• Questionnaires that carry out information from other key students and learners

• These questionnaires are used by sound pathologist or the audiologist to gather more information from psychologists or language experts, medical practitioners and teachers and parents and they are used for an overall evaluation of the learning disability in a particular individual.

• This test also allows one to understand and evaluate disorders related to learning disabilities, problems in reading and understanding, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactive disorders and other forms of behavioral disorders.

The particular kit for auditory processing assessment:

The APAK or the auditory processing assessment kit is a sound and effective system that allows an individual to understand and locate auditory processing assessment on a larger and better plane. These kits are generally composed by trained medical practitioners, therapists, psychologists and teachers or special educators who want to eradicate or lessen the auditory disorders in children or in adults. These kits usually contain:

• Two or three interactive CDs in Multimedia format

• A booklet that has a detailed instruction about how to understand the entire kit. While some CDs are developed and managed for children who are from the initial years of their school life to their fourth years, the other discs are designed and aimed at those children who are older but all those who are affected with serious learning difficulties.

These CDs contain score sheets which can be printed as the teacher’s or the parent’s concern, sentence construction and framing categories, pre-recorded verbal variations and presentations of words and digits, classroom tips, research methods and assessment structures, video clippings of all those children who are actually undergoing the tests and multiple therapies, and also practical strategies through which children can overcome their minor and major learning difficulties.

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