Team Stacy: Maybe it’s all about perSPECtive (don’t take it out of context)

It’s a dark Tuesday night and our team has yet again mustered up the strength to meet despite the weight of school that rests on our shoulders. As I reflect on our team meeting, I have come to recognize how powerful it is when colleagues of different professions come together for one purpose. Regardless of events that may have taken place during the day, all of our concerns, worries, and burdens is left at the door the moment we gather to discuss the progress of our “Voice Read” web extension.

Over the past couple of months, our team caught a lot of momentum as we saw our web extension “Voice Read”come to life. We started as group communicating via email and struggling to find the best times to meet. But here we are now, nearing the end of our project and in the final stages of perfecting our product.

In addition to tweaking and finalizing Voice Reader, two team members have been administering 2 reading assessments – one without using Voice Reader and the next with Voice Reader. I found it interesting that, while I expected to see drastic change between the two scores, her test scores do not reflect improvement when using Voice Reader.

In our OT curriculum, our professors remind us that standardized scores do not provide clinicians the “full picture” of the person. Yet often times, without these scores many will question the validity of a information that is provided. I, too, generally question reports that only provide qualitative/subjective data. There is too high of a risk for responses of self-report/interviews  to be skewed or biased.

However, this experience, working on Voice Read,  has really challenged my preconception towards the validity of subjective data. Our client’s score indicates that Voice Read is not an effective tool in promoting her comprehension or readability. Yet, during team meetings Stacy has shown great excitement and satisfaction with the continual improvement that has been made to ensure that Voice Read fits her needs.

Take away message: There needs to be greater focus on ensuring that the assessment is accurately measuring the outcome of interest. Moreover, just as gold is equally valued as to diamonds –> qualitative data should also be as equally valued as quantitative data.

 

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