Renfrew Bus Story North American Edition
The Renfrew Bus Story –North American (RBS-NA) edition is a short screening assessment of receptive and expressive oral language for young children age 3 years to 6 years 11 months. Using the ecologically valid method of narrative retell, the RBS-NA provides quantitative and qualitative assessment of a child’s oral language skills based on rich language data.
The assessment is quick to administer and enjoyable for children as it capitalizes on a paradigm familiar to most children – storytelling.
The Renfrew Bus Story – North American edition (Glasgow & Cowley, 1994) is based on the original Bus Story test developed as a part of the Renfrew Language Scales by Catherine Renfrew in the United Kingdom (Renfrew, 1969). The UK version was standardized on children in the UK, is still used extensively, and has been shown to be able to identify children with language impairments, as well as to be predictive of later language and academic skill (Stothard, Snowling, Bishop, Chipchase, & Kaplan, 1998).
The North American edition incorporates vocabulary and pictures that are more appropriate for North American children, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the elements of the story. The RBS-NA was created by Cheryl Glasgow and Judy Cowley in 1994, and the ownership of the copyright was transferred to Dr Alissa Lange in March 2009.
A significant revision and re-standardization project for the assessment is in the planning stages. Click here for details.
Glasgow, C., & Cowley, J. (1994). Renfrew Bus Story test - North American Edition. Centreville, DE: Centreville School.
Renfrew, C. E. (1969). The Bus Story. Oxford: Author.
Stothard, S. E., Snowling, M. J., Bishop, D.V.M., Chipchase, B. B., Kaplan, C. A. (1998). Language-impaired preschoolers: A follow-up into adolescence. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 41, 407–418.
Story retell requires integration of many skills and abilities, including the co-ordination of auditory and visual input, attention, listening, comprehension, memory, sentence formulation, and narrative schema understanding.
Scoring of the story retell provides indicators of these abilities and yields a broad picture of children’s language skill, with the convenience of a short screening assessment.
The RBS-NA can be used for:
- Monitoring for language disorders
- Monitoring of academics
- An in-depth language evaluation
- Identifying language abilities compared to norms
Who should use the RBS-NA?
- Special education teachers
- Researchers
- Speech and language therapists
User Qualifications Required: Yes
Ages: 3 years 6 months to 7 years
Administration Time: 10 minutes
Administration Method: Individual
Scores:
Sentence length (mean of 5 longest utterances), Complexity (number of complex utterances), Information (vocabulary/key words), Independence (inverse of amount of prompting needed for retell), Behavior (observation score for listening and attention behavior)
Standard scores and percentiles available for Sentence length, Complexity, and Information subscales. Additional qualitative scales provide a profile of a child's language, learning, and work style.
We are in the process of applying for funding to revise the Renfrew Bus Story – North American Edition. We will also collect updated norms for the new assessment.
Potential revisions include the following:
- A parallel story to allow for retesting
- Use of advanced statistical scoring procedures for more reliable results
- Computerized scoring
- A Spanish version
More information on this project will be posted here as it becomes available.
© Copyright 2009
Alissa Lange