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Total Communication Recording and Scoring Overview

A child’s communication events are counted (tallied) on the ECI Recording Sheet.

The column headings across the top, left to right, correspond to the Key Skill Elements (Gestures, Vocalizations, Single Words, Multiple Words), and Total Communication.
The rows down the left side are labeled by 1-minute periods, you tally in the key skill elements you observe the child made in the first minute in this row and in these cells; move down to the next row in the 2nd minute, repeating this in all subsequent minutes until finished.
Fill in the column totals after recording - add up the 6-minute total frequencies of each Key Skill Element (for Vocalizations through Multiple Words). The grand sum is the Total Communication count, to be placed in the bottom most, right cell in the sheet.
Use these values as this child’s communicative outcome for this date and enter them into the IGDI Child Data System.

Live Recording

If you are recording live, begin recording immediately as the 6-minute play session begins. Make sure you are in a position to see and hear the child’s communications from the very beginning. Use the sheet for recording as previously described. Use the timer to prompt you to move down a row after each minute. End exactly after six minutes has elapsed with the play partner.

View one of the videos below to see a sample of an ECI assessment from the assessor's point of view (All video on this site requires Windows Media Player 7.1 or higher. If you don't already have it, download it here for free.

Play lower-quality video clip (Est. download time: dial-up = 40sec; broadband= 5sec)
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• If you have to pause while the child is redirected by the play partner, click the timer to stop, and resume it from that point on when the child and partner are back in place and interacting. (Timers used need to cumulate elapsed time with pause and resume capability).
• If for some reason, the session ends prematurely make certain to stop the watch immediately so that the exact length of the session in minutes and seconds may be used in forming a score based on a partial session (less than 6 minutes, 4' 28"). You record the stop time on the sheet in the left most column in terms of minutes and seconds elapsed from the start up to a maximum of 6 minutes.

Recording from Video Tape

If you are recording from tape, begin your recording when the play partner vocally signals “start” as previously described. Record the child’s communications as described in prior sections accounting for the passing of time and any intra-session pauses that might have occurred. Adjust the audio level as needed – stop, back up, and re-record if you find the audio is too low. If you do back up the tape however, you must account for the difference in elapsed time or start over completely.

ECI Weighted Scoring Convention (the online data system calculates these weights automatically)

• In all cases with the ECI, the 6-minute frequencies of the four key skill elements are divided by time to form the simple rate of communication per minute for each of Gestures, Vocalization, Single and Multiple Words. These rates of communicating are graphed to provide a record of growth and variation over time.
• For the Total Communication composite score, however, single word and multiple word utterances are weighted before they are summed to make a composite score.

Because research demonstrated that gestures and vocalizations are replaced by single and multiple words as children become more proficient communicators over time, weighting is used to calculate the Total Communication growth indicator for children birth to 3 years (Luze et al., 2001). As young children develop from using primarily prelinguistic (i.e., gestures, vocalizations) to spoken communicative key skill elements (i.e., single and multiple words), the weighted ECI indicator is sensitive to this change in proficiency. Therefore, in the calculation of Total Communication:

• Gestures and vocalizations are given a weight of 1 per occurrence
• Single words are given a weight of 2 (multiply tally by 2)
• Multiple words are given weight of 3 (multiply tally by 3)

After weighting, the composite sum is divided by elapsed time (6-minutes) to form a Total Communication Rate Score for charting. This calculation is made automatically after you enter the raw counts into the Child Data System.