Purpose: The overall objective of the present study was to conduct a series of investigations to examine the need for, and use of speech pathology services by school-aged children in Tasmania. Specifically, investigations aimed to: a) report the prevalence of speech and/or language impairment amongst the preparatory student population enrolled in 2005 in the Northern Branch of the Department of Education Tasmania; b) determine the extent to which speech pathology services were used by this preparatory student population during their prior kindergarten year (2004); c) quantify the presence and degree of any unmet speech pathology service need within this specific student population; d) examine the nature and accuracy of teacher identification of speech and language impairment amongst the student population during their prior kindergarten year using current mandatory educational assessment (Kindergarten Development Check [KDC]); and e) explore teacher referral patternsfor students identified as having speech and/or language impairment on mandatory educational assessment, to speech pathology services. Methods: To address the aims of the present study, three individual data sets were used. The first data set was obtained through direct assessment of the speech and language skills of a cohort (N = 308) of preparatory students by a speech-language pathologist in 2005. This data was used to determine the prevalence of speech and/or language impairment. The second data set was information pertaining to the number of enrolled preparatory students who had accessed speech pathology services in their prior kindergarten year (2004), sourced from the speech pathology database of the Northern Branch of the Department of Education Tasmania. Comparison of data from the direct assessment of students by the speech-language pathologist and information from the speech pathology database enabled a determination of the presence and degree of any unmet speech pathology service need within this specific student population. The third and final data set was the results of the KDC, conducted by teachers on all students in their kindergarten year (2004). This data was obtained following a search within the electronic KDC database. Subsequent comparison between the student results from this KDC database and the direct assessment by the speech-language pathologist determined the accuracy of teacher identification of speech and/or language impairment using this specific tool. Further comparison of the student results from the KDC database, direct assessment and the speech pathology database also yielded information on teacher referral patterns for students identified as either speech or language-impaired on the KDC, together with the overall percentage of confirmed speech or language-impaired students referred to speech pathology services.Results: The overall prevalence of speech and/or language impairment was found to be 41.2% within the population studied. Specifically, 8.7% of students were found to have isolated speech impairment, 18.2% had isolated language impairment, and 14.3% were diagnosed with comorbid speech and language impairment. Despite the high overall prevalence of speech and/or language impairment, only 18.4% of the total enrolled preparatory student population was found to have accessed speech pathology services during their kindergarten year. It was therefore estimated that 36.1% of speech-impaired and 75.8% of language-impaired preparatory students respectively did not access speech pathology services during their first year at school. Comparison of student data from educational and speech pathology testing observed that the current teacher-administered kindergarten assessment (KDC) was ineffective in facilitating student access to speech pathology services where needed. The sensitivity of teacher identification of speech and language impairment on the KDC was only 50% and 15% respectively, indicating that 50% of all students confirmed as having speech impairment and 85% of students confirmed as having language impairment on speech pathology testing failed to be identified by teaching professionals on this specific tool. Further consideration of teacher referral patterns found that only 57.1% of students identified by teachers as having some type of communication impairment on the KDC were subsequently referred to speech pathology services. Of those students referred, only just over half (51.4%) were confirmed by speech pathology assessment as being either speech or languageimpaired, with the remainder found to have typical speech and language skills. When the total speech and language-impaired population was examined, the percentage of children appropriately referred by teachers was therefore only 25.3%.Conclusions: The present study illustrated that speech and language impairment are prevalent conditions within the preparatory student population of northern Tasmania. Unfortunately, a substantial number of these speech and/or language-impaired students failed to access available speech pathology services during their kindergarten year. Teacher administration of mandatory educational assessment, designed to identify ‘at risk’ kindergarten students, has been identified as one reason for poor student access to speech pathology services during the first year of formal schooling. Not only were teachers found to be inaccurate in identifying students with speech, and to a greater extent language impairment using the KDC, but students identified as having speech and/or language impairment on this specific tool were not routinely referred to speech pathology services. Given the key role of teachers in administering the KDC to identify students in need of speech pathology services, local speechlanguage pathologists must seek to improve: a) the sensitivity of the KDC; and b) the knowledge of teaching professionals regarding the presentation of speech and/or language impairment and the importance of early referral.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第17921号 / 情博第503号 / 新制||情||89(附属図書館) / 30741 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 石田 亨, 教授 田中 克己, 教授 黒橋 禎夫 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Although service oriented architecture has reached a particular maturity level especially in the technological dimension, there is a lack of common and acceptable approach to design a software system through composition and integration of web services. In this thesis, a service oriented system design approach for Service Oriented Architecture based software development is introduced to fill this gap. This new methodology basically offers a procedural top-down decomposition of a given software system allowing several abstraction levels. At the higher levels of the decomposition, the system is divided into abstract nodes that correspond to process models in the decomposition tree. Any node is a process and keeps the sequence and the state information for the possible sub-processes in this decomposition tree. Nodes which are defined as process models may include some sub-nodes to present details for the intermediate levels of the model. Eventually at the leaf level, process models are decomposed into existing web services as the atomic units of system execution. All processes constructing the system decomposition tree are modeled with BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to expose the algorithmic details of the design. This modeling technique is also supported with a graphical modeling language referred to as SOSEML (Service Oriented Software Engineering Modeling Language) that is also newly introduced in this thesis.