Due to the limited evidence available to support clinical decisions, the principles of evidence-based practice (EBP) are not necessarily easy to apply to the various disciplines of speech-language pathology. There are also controversial features of EBP that affect its implementation, including questions about acceptable forms of evidence and the importance of non-research factors on treatment efficacy. This clinical forum explores how research can be combined with reason to decide which treatment approaches to use with clients who have fluency, phonology, and literacy problems.

Learning Outcomes
You will be able to:

• identify how research, clinical expertise, client values, a clinician’s theoretical perspective, and service delivery issues affect treatment decisions for children with speech-sound disorders
• discuss valuable and controversial aspects of EBP, as well as the obstacles that may impede the application of evidence to clinical practice
• describe the response-to-intervention (RTI) model, and how SLPs can use it to decrease the prevalence of reading problems
• describe a seven-step EBP decision-making process, and show how it can be used to evaluate intervention approaches to improve grammatical morphology in children with language impairments

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