Telepractice-Based Assessment of Children who are Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing: Focus on Family-Centered Practice

Ongoing assessment and progress monitoring is considered best practice to serve children who are Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) yet logistics related to provider shortages, distances between families, and illness make regular assessment difficult if not impossible. In the last ten years, telepractice has become a more commonly used service delivery model for serving children who are DHH and their families, however, many providers lack the training needed to adequately assess this population (Behl & Kahn, 2015). With explicit planning of the assessments and tools needed on both sides of the camera, providers can create a shared framework to collect the information needed to create a family-centered, comprehensive assessment plan that empowers families to engage collaborative decision-making needed to optimize the outcomes of their child. This paper outlines a tutorial of provider considerations to incorporate family-centered practices as a central aspect of assessment via telepractice and provides an example of how assessments can be administered with the use of technology