Has your child had a language test and received standard scores and percentiles?

What do they really mean? We explain how to interpret the CELF…

The most widely used test by all speech pathologists in Australia is the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (aka the CELF). The CELF-P2 evaluates the language skills of children under 6yrs who are not yet in formal schooling, and the CELF-5 is used for children aged 5-21 years.

The CELF assesses your child’s understanding and use of language (also referred to as their receptive and expressive language skills) and compares this to their peers of the same age. The speech pathologist will list your child’s strengths and difficulties, and let you know if therapy is recommended to support your child’s academic success. These recommendations are based on the conversion of your child’s individual scores to standard scores and percentiles.

What is a Standard Score?

Your child’s individual score will be converted to give a standard score out of 20, where 7-13 is the range for normal performance and 10 is the most typical performance. Both standard scores and percentiles (see below) are similar and explained by the bell curve chart.

What are Percentile Ranks?

Percentile ranks are an easy way to compare your child to other children of the same age. For example, if your child has a percentile rank of 16, they fall in the 16th percentile and scored higher than 16% of children the same age who took the same test. If your child earned a percentile rank of 75 on a standardised test, they scored the same or better than 75 percent of their peers. Percentile ranks are not the same as percent of correct answers on a test.

Your speech pathologist will recommend therapy for any area of language where your child scored below the average range, or where their performance was significantly lower than their other skills. You will be able to tell if your child is making progress in therapy by looking at these results across several years of testing.

As a parent it is important that you have a full understanding of your child’s strengths and difficulties, as this will help you support them outside of therapy. If you do not understand your child’s language assessment results, please ask your speech pathologist to go through their report and recommendation with you.