By Deborah ross Swain EdD and Nancy Long PhD
Purpose: Provide a profile of a student's ability to process many types of auditory information
Age: 5 through to 12.11yrs
Admin: Individual
Time: 45 minutes
Qualification Level: B
The Auditory Processing Abilities Test (APAT) uses tasks similar to classroom activities to provide a profile of a student's ability to process many types of auditory information. Difficulties with these skills may interfere with both academic and social success. APAT is intended to be one part of a collaborative assessment. It is designed to be used by speech & language therapists, audiologists, educational psychologists and other assessment professionals.
APAT provides a comprehensive assessment of specific skills that impact the development and use of the spoken and written language: phonemic skills, auditory memory (for words, digits, sentences and content information), processing of semantic relationships and complex sentences, following directions and comprehension of the details and main ideas in passages.
A student's abilities are interpreted in light of:
- Individual subtest scaled scores
- A global standard score
- Index standard scores for Auditory Memory (word sequences, content memory - both immediate and delayed and following directions) and Linguistic Processes (phonemic awareness, semantic relationships, sentence memory, cued recall, complex sentences, sentence absurdities and passage comprehension).
In addition, two optional analyses provide further investigation of student's abilities:
- An optional memory analysis details the student's immediate, delayed, sequential and cued recall processes.
- An optional linguistic analysis shows the student's skills in auditory discrimination, auditory sequencing and auditory cohesion.
