Frequently Asked Question:
Is there any way for a student to correctly answer the expressive portion of the Word Classes subtest if the receptive portion is incorrect?
Answer:
The CELF-4 Word Classes subtest includes both a receptive task and an expressive task. For the receptive task, the student selects two words from a choice of 4 words that he or she thinks “go together” the best. For the expressive task, the student explains why the two words that he or she selected go together.
Even if the student’s response to the receptive task is incorrect, you administer the expressive task, using the words that the student selected. This is so that the flow of test administration is not interrupted, and the student is not made aware that he or she gave an incorrect response.
The Word Classes expressive task is designed to assess whether a student understands and can express the relationship between two words. On the receptive task, if a student selects an incorrect pair of words, it is assumed that he or she does not understand the relationship between the correct pair (target pair) of words. Therefore, he or she cannot correctly express the relationship. Thus, if a student receives a 0 score (incorrect response) on the receptive task, then he or she receives a 0 score on the expressive task. Therefore, the receptive raw score is either equal to or greater than the expressive raw score, but never less than the expressive raw score.
