Assessing for Happiness: Collecting Data That Targets Self-Identity and Long-Term Wellbeing

In this session, speech-language pathologist Chris Wenger, known online as the Speech Dude, presents a close look at how evaluation data about neurodivergent students gets collected, and what it does to them once it is written down. Chris has worked with neurodivergent students for nearly 25 years, taught high school before he became an SLP, and created the DASEL, a strengths-based informal assessment.

He starts with the checklists themselves, reading out the items that come up on common pragmatic and social-skills forms, from "doesn't maintain eye contact" to "behaves in ways that seem strange or bizarre," and traces how those ratings become the report, the IEP goals, and the story a child hears about themself. A ninth grader whose report led to a back-row seat and a supervised lunch table, before anyone had met him, shows the cost. Chris then lays out a "translate before you score" process built on three questions: whose norm is this, what else could explain it, and what does the student say. He follows it with four kinds of happiness data: who I am; what makes me calm, happy, and safe; what my body tells me; and my no counts. He is candid about his own ADHD and about why masking makes a compliant test session produce inaccurate data.

Therapists, school psychologists, educators, and parents will come away with plain-language rewrites for deficit-based report language, a way to gather input from the student before the scoring starts, and a set of free goals and regulation accommodations ready for an IEP. Grounded in Chris's years at the IEP table and his own lived experience, this session is funny, warm, and practical.