The LCT-A: NU evaluates a student's abilities in listening comprehension skills. Teachers can use the results to help students improve their skills and behaviors in both the classroom and in everyday listening situations. There are five subtests: Main Idea, Details, Reasoning, Vocabulary and Semantics, and Understanding Messages. Students are required to (a) pay careful attention to what they hear, (b) listen with a purpose in mind, and (c) remember what they hear well enough to think about it. Students must also avoid being impulsive in giving answers, and they must express answers verbally. The test can be used to identify students who have specific language impairments, plan interventions, and represent listening comprehension in research studies.
New Features
- Characteristics of the normative sample were stratified by age relative to region, gender, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic factors, as well as other critical variables, and are the same as those reported for the school-age population reported in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2017 (ProQuest, 2017).
- Each item on the test was evaluated using both conventional item analysis to choose good items and differential item analyses to find and eliminate potentially biased items.
- The Total Score was renamed the Listening Comprehension Index. This index is based on a sum of the subtest scaled scores rather than raw scores, and has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The index gives equal weight to each of the subtests.
- The Listening Comprehension Index has more-than-adequate floors and ceilings for the assessment of the listening comprehension ability of examinees across adolescent ages and ability levels.
- The average coefficient alpha is .94 for the Listening Comprehension Index.
- The test was subjected to diagnostic accuracy analyses, which are particularly rigorous techniques involving the computation of sensitivity, specificity, and the receiver operating characteristic/area under the curve (ROC/AUC) statistics. The results demonstrate that the Listening Comprehension Index cutoff score of 92 resulted in a sensitivity of .71, a specificity of .79, and a ROC/AUC of .82 for differentiating students who have a specific language impairment from typically developing students.
- The Examiner-s Manual was reorganized and rewritten to provide more detailed information on the administration, interpretation, and statistical characteristics of the test.
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