Ensuring the Effectiveness of Academic and Clinical Preparation for Stuttering Treatment

Robert Kroll and Thomas Klassen

Longitudinal surveys of Canadian speech-language pathologists regarding their academic and clinical preparation for working with individuals who stutter show consistently low ratings of academic and clinical experience with stuttering over a fifteen year period. A survey of university educators of speech-language pathology programs revealed a shortage of clinical placement sites and a low percentage of classroom time allocated to fluency disorders, as well as considerable variation in student preparation across programs. The findings have implications for the effectiveness of both academic and clinical preparation, as well as practice.