ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a framework for assessing children’s skills in sharing stories over
time and considers how to plan interventions based on the assessment.
There are different ways of assessing children’s skills, depending on why you are
carrying out the assessment. For example, you might want to find out if the child has a
problem or is particularly good at telling stories. Standardised tests, which are reliable to
administer and give you a score, are one way of doing this. The score will tell you how
the child compares with other children of the same chronological or mental age. These
sorts of tests are ‘standardised’; that is, the table of scores is based on the test having
been administered in exactly the same way to large groups of children of different ages.
This means there are very strict rules about how the test should be carried out. Usually,
the test involves the children making up a story from wordless pictures, or remembering
a story you have told them. These results don’t always relate very closely to what the
