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Nickola Wolf Nelson, Elena Plante, Nancy Helm-Estabrooks, Gillian Hotz
The Test of Integrated Language & Literacy Skills™ (TILLS™) is the reliable, valid assessment professionals need to test oral and written language skills in students ages 6 - 18 years. TILLS is a comprehensive, norm-referenced test that has been standardised for three purposes:
To achieve these purposes, TILLS is constructed to allow you to derive scores for identifying, tracking, and profiling a student's strengths and weaknesses and interpreting the results to support decisions about what to do next.
The TILLS assessment is all professionals need to capture the complete picture of students' oral and written language skills. TILLS is composed of 15 subtests that allow examiners to assess and compare students' language-literacy skills at both the sound/word level and the sentence/discourse level across the four oral and written modalities—listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
TILLS measures integrated language-literacy abilities that reflect the complex language and literacy demands of the general education curriculum.
Each TILLS subtest has been fine-tuned to meet strong psychometric standards using scientific evidence gathered in numerous pilot studies and field trials, a national beta trial, and a standardisation study with more than 1200 children and adolescents across the United States.
TILLS tested both sensitivity and specificity across the full age range covered by the test. In the manual, diagnostic accuracy data are broken down into nine different "age bands" meaningful to the development of language and literacy skills. Sensitivity ranges from 81% to 97%, and specificity ranges from 81% to 100%.
TILLS is ideal for evaluating students:
Professionals can administer the entire test, single subtests, or combinations of subtests in one or more sessions. Identification core subtests can be administered in only 25-45 minutes, and a comprehensive assessment can typically be administered in 90 minutes or less. Raw scores are converted to standard scores and Composite standard scores. Cut scores indicate whether the students score is consistent with the presence of a language/literacy disorder.
Now we have the evidence that this trusted test can be reliably administered using distance technology when you can’t see students face to face! After a timely 2020 study supported the validity of administering TILLS virtually, the TILLS developers now include updated Tele-TILLS materials to guide users who are supporting students in online settings. The Tele-TILLS components are:
The TILLS Easy-Score is a free and convenient electronic scoring solution for TILLS - access TILLS Easy-Score
The TILLS Examiner's Kit includes:
Tele-TILLS is now included with the latest version of the TILLS Examiner's Kit.
If you already own TILLS, then one copy of Tele-TILLS should be purchased for each TILLS Examiner’s Kit. You can buy Tele-TILLS from the publisher's website.
Tele-TILLS is not available for purchase separately in Australia, but it can be purchased as part of the new TILLS Examiner's Kit (Now with Tele-TILLS).
TILLS is ideal for evaluating students between the ages of 6 and 18 with any of the following characteristics:
Included with the Test of Integrated Language & Literacy Skills is a “Student Language Scale” (SLS), which can be completed by parents, teachers, and students to show each party’s perspective on how the student is performing on academic tasks as compared to their same age peers. It’s a simple one-page checklist that helps identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in language and literacy skills and other non-language areas (though it’s not a pragmatics checklist). The SLS is to be used with TILLS, and is also recommended for use as a stand-alone tool to gather valuable information about a student, or for use with other assessments of student performance and potential.
You could also start by giving the Identification Core subtests on the TILLS to decide whether it you should give the entire TILLS battery.
The TILLS Student Language Scale (SLS) allows students, parents, and teachers to rate how well a student performs academic tasks compared to same-age peers and indicates areas to target for helping the student improve in school. The SLS is a simple one-page checklist that helps identify perceptions of students’ strengths and weaknesses in language and literacy skills that are observed directly with TILLS, as well as other non-language areas.
It can be used with TILLS, with other tests, or on its own. The SLS can be completed before or after TILLS and provides another source of input on the students’ performance from multiple sources.
TILLS was developed so that you may administer single subtests or combinations of them as well as the entire test. We recommend administration of all TILLS subtests, however, in order to develop a comprehensive profile of a student’s relative strengths and weaknesses. You should be able to administer all 15 subtests to most students in one 70- to 90-minute session or two 45-minute sessions. If shorter sessions are required, all sessions should be completed within a time span of no more than 4 weeks.
For tracking change in a particular skill area, you may wish to administer only those subtests that relate to that skill area. Ten of the fifteen subtests that make up TILLS can be given as stand-alone measures. Another five must be given after another related subtest.
TILLS incorporates subtests of language phonology, but not articulation; however, you can observe articulation qualitatively as the student performs the spoken language TILLS tasks. There are several reasons that we decided not to include an articulation subtest on TILLS. Research shows that articulation skills alone are not related directly to academic language abilities needed for reading and writing, whereas phonological language skills are. In designing TILLS to be a comprehensive test of language and literacy skills, we wanted to control length and measure skills that were most related to academic language. We also wanted neuropsychologists, school psychologists, and others who are not speech-language pathologists and not typically trained to administer articulation tests to be able to administer TILLS. Therefore, we decided not to incorporate a traditional articulation test as a TILLS subtest.
The most direct measures of phonological language skills in TILLS are Nonword Repetition and Phonemic Awareness. Nonword Repetition assesses the ability to perceive, remember, and reproduce speech sounds in sequence in the context of nonwords that have been formed to mirror word structure found in academic vocabulary. Therefore some real bound morphemes are included, such as –ing and –ology. Similarly, the Phonemic Awareness subtest assesses students’ abilities to repeat nonword stimuli accurately, but after removing the first speech sound (i.e., phoneme) and only the first speech sound. This enables observation of the student’s concept of a phoneme. Students’ responses on either of these subtests are not penalised for consistent articulatory sound substitutions, such as w/r, w/l, or th/s, or for regional or cultural pronunciation variants of vowels or consonants. Examiners, of course, may note errors of articulation under qualitative comments for these or any TILLS subtest that requires spoken language responses (including Vocabulary Awareness, Story Retelling, Delayed Story Retelling, and Social Communication).
Students who demonstrate difficulties with phonological aspects of oral language at the sound/word level in Nonword Repetition, Nonword Spelling, and Nonword Reading. A key difference in these subtests is that the written language nonword tasks require the ability to relate letter sequences to phonological sequences, going from letters to sounds in the case of Nonword Reading and sounds to letters in the case of Nonword Spelling. When students exhibit similar problems when attempting to repeat, read, and spell nonword items, it may signal a need for intervention aimed at helping them become more aware of the phonological elements that are represented by alphabetic sequences and patterns in print.
When students have strengths in reading compared to spoken repetition and spelling, as students do who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or who have marked oral language deficits, it may be helpful to teach them to draw on their stronger abilities to perceive and remember print to help them perceive and remember speech sounds in words. Conversely, if students have strengths in the oral modality compared to processing orthographic patterns in print, as students with dyslexia do, clinicians might emphasise speech sound awareness to learn associations with print in reading decoding or spelling unfamiliar words.
TILLS was developed so that you may administer single subtests or combinations of them as well as the entire test. We recommend administration of all TILLS subtests, however, in order to develop a comprehensive profile of a student’s relative strengths and weaknesses. For tracking change in a particular skill area, you may wish to administer only those subtests that relate to skill areas of particular interest. The danger would be, however, overlooking areas that might be of concern because they are falling further behind. It’s important to know that TILLS was designed and standardized for three purposes:
If you wanted to administer TILLS for purpose 1, you would only need to administer the subtests that effectively identify language and literacy disorders in children your student’s age. Even though you would have high likelihood of identifying a disorder if present, you would not have a complete profile of the student’s abilities if you only administered the Identification Core subtests for the student’s age.
If you wanted to administer TILLS for purposes 2, we recommend that you administer all 15 subtests so you have a comprehensive profile of your student’s strength and weaknesses. If you wanted to administer TILLS for purpose 3, we recommend that you administer all 15 subtests on initial testing and then the subtests that represent areas you wish to track on follow-up. Alternatively, if you were concerned solely about certain skills, you could administer a subset of the tests on initial and follow up test sessions. In any case the same subtests should be administered no less than 6 months apart.
Please note, some subtests may not be administered alone but must be administered as part of a pair. Explicit instructions on test administration can be found in the Examiner’s Manual.
We eliminated some subtests at this age because our data indicated that many typically developing students had not yet developed the skills required by the subtests. This was true for subtests that measure skills we would expect to be emerging in early first grade (i.e., subtests measuring reading and writing). When typically developing students pass few items, it is difficult or impossible to differentiate impaired performance by children with language and literacy disorders from typically developing performance.
The following 5 subtests should not be administered to students who are between the ages of 6;0 and 6;5:
Question continues: .... I have assessed 2 students: one student had more lower scores overall than the other student. The "lower student" exceeded the "cut score" whereas the student who had some significantly higher scores did not meet the "cut score". Therefore the student who received more average scores overall ended up being a student who the test would say is "consistent with the presence of a language/literacy disorder", whereas the student who had more below average scores did not meet this criterion (by virtue of which subtests were chosen).
Answer: The specific subtests for the age-group identification cores were selected to correctly identify the highest percentages of students in each age group who are known to have the disorder (sensitivity) while avoiding over-identifying (specificity) [see discussion about this in separate strand]. However, due to intervention or unusually strong scores on an included subtest, or a less common profile, situations like the one Cindy describes are possible where a student scores low on some subtests but not low enough to reach the cut score on the ones that are part of the Identification Core. We have allowed for flexibility of interpretation in alternative language included in the newly available TILLS report writing templates. Age group specific templates can be downloaded for free
"TILLS is an excellent comprehensive tool for all ages of students in the assessment of language, listening, memory, and reading skills."
- Jayne Trombley, MA CCC-SLP, retired public school speech/language pathologist, clinical supervisor, Western Michigan University
"The TILLS is the most comprehensive assessment I’ve used in the 20 years I’ve been a school-based speech-language pathologist. The Common Core Standards are heavily laden with complex language. School-based SLPs need a comprehensive assessment that identifies those language deficits for our students."
- Sue Torney, M.A., CCC-SLP, Speech-Language Pathologist
"With TILLS, I can give one assessment and get a wealth of information rather than giving multiple assessments, which I am currently having to do."
- Audrey Adams, M.A., Reading Specialist
"[TILLS] culls out and differentiates problematic areas of language and literacy, as well as areas of strength, that no other formal measures accomplish. Findings gleaned from TILLS offer productive avenues to probe in the context of follow-up treatment. TILLS offers a unique and seminal contribution to language and literacy assessment."
- Sue Ellen Krause, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-F, Speech-Language Pathologist
"TILLS looks at reading, writing, and language in more depth than any other assessment I have used. I am thrilled to use TILLS to help identify academic challenges of my students with learning disabilities."
- Elizabeth DeBoer, Ed.S., school psychologist
"Very easy to administer and score.… I expect the TILLS to be a major component in the evaluation of my students in the future."
- Cathleen Queeno-Wall, M.A., CCC-SLP, Speech-Language Pathologist
"TILLS looks at reading, writing, and language in more depth than any other assessment I have used. I am thrilled to use TILLS to help identify academic challenges of my students with learning disabilities."
- Elizabeth DeBoer, Ed.S., school psychologist
