OTS 184: Your BOT-3 Questions Answered!
- Jayson Davies
- Sep 8, 2025
- 42 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 184 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Discover the exciting updates and enhancements of the BOT-3 assessment tool with Dr. Elizabeth Munsell, Research Director at Pearson.
Learn how this latest version offers updated norms, supplemental scores, and innovative features designed specifically for school-based occupational therapy practitioners.
Dr. Munsell explains the key differences between BOT-2 and BOT-3, including new growth scale values for better progress monitoring and specialized scoring options like the Planning and Coordination subtest. She also shares practical insights on how to use assessment results to connect motor performance with functional academic and social participation goals.
Join Jayson Davies for this episode that answers your most pressing questions about transitioning to the BOT-3 and maximizing its clinical value. Listen now to enhance your assessment practices and better support your students' motor development needs!
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will identify the key differences between the BOT-2 and BOT-3, including updated norms, supplemental scores, and growth scale values (GSVs).
Learners will explain how the new features of the BOT-3 can support connections between motor performance and functional, academic, and social participation.
Learners will recognize practical considerations for transitioning to the BOT-3, such as communicating its value to administrators and using it in school-based practice.
Guest(s) Bio
Dr. Elizabeth Munsell began her career path after witnessing the impact therapists had on children with disabilities, inspiring her to pursue occupational therapy. She earned her master’s in OT from Boston University, where she also taught and later completed a PhD in Rehabilitation Science focusing on supporting adolescents with developmental disabilities as they transition to adulthood.
Clinically, she worked in school systems and at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital before moving into research, completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Her projects have included improving employment outcomes for people with Parkinson’s disease, identifying barriers to work for individuals with disabilities, and exploring technology-based ways to measure community participation after stroke.
Today, as Research Director for OT Assessments at Pearson, Dr. Munsell blends her clinical expertise with research to enhance standardized assessments such as the BOT-3, helping occupational therapy practitioners connect motor performance to meaningful participation in school, work, and daily life.
Quotes
“Using updated tools is the best way to ensure accurate, equitable, and defensible evaluations.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“The BOT-3 isn’t about just measuring motor skills—it’s about helping us explain how those skills impact handwriting, classroom tasks, playground activities, and participation in school life.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“OTPs can use the BOT-3 results from that test to make a connection between the body functions and participation.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“BOT-3 as a bridge. It grounds our understanding in motor function so that we can actively link those findings to real-world functional, academic and social participation goals.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“Something that would go really well with the bot is something that looks a little bit more at activities or participation.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“Reminding your administrators that we do have that responsibility to try to get to the newest test as soon as possible.”
– Dr. Elizabeth Munsell
“Our ethical dilemma and our ethics within occupational therapy guide us toward using the most updated assessment tools without a doubt."
–Jayson Davies, M.A., OTR/L
Resources
👉BOT-2 (Previous version of the assessment)
👉Pedi CAT (Mentioned as a complementary assessment that looks at student performance of activities)
👉School Function Assessment (SFA) Note: Mentioned that Pearson is developing SFA-2 (early stages)
👉Movement ABC-3 (Movement Assessment Battery for Children, Third Edition) includes a motor performance test and a checklist
👉DASH (Mentioned as a handwriting assessment that can complement BOT findings)
👉Vineland (Adaptive behavior measure - mentioned as being updated)
👉Q-global (Pearson's digital platform)
Episode Transcript
Expand to view episode transcript
Jayson Davies
OT, hello there. And welcome to episode 184 of the OT school house podcast. If this is your first time here, welcome and if you've listened to anywhere between one and 183 other episodes, welcome back today. We are diving into one of the most asked questions I ever receive, especially when it comes to evaluations, and that is, what is the difference about the bot three, and do I really need to upgrade from my trusty bot two? So to help us answer these burning questions and more, I am pleased to be joined by Dr Elizabeth Munsell, a research director of OT assessments at Pearson assessments. She was deeply involved in the developing of this newest version of the assessment. So we know she knows a lot and has a lot to share with us. If you've ever wondered whether the bot two is still valid, how the new norms might affect your evaluations, or how the new and mysterious growth scale values can better support student progress, even when percentile ranks don't budge, stay tuned. Dr Munsell shares helpful insights about supplemental scores that will help you connect motor performance to functional academic and social participation goals, making your assessment data more meaningful for the IEP planning. In addition to that, we'll tackle the big question on your mind, like, how do you convince your administrators to invest in this updated assessment tool, we are all familiar with the bot two, but the bot three is out now. So whether you are a bot veteran or just starting to explore motor assessments, this episode has practical knowledge you can apply immediately to your school based practice. So please help me. Welcome to the OT school house podcast. Dr Elizabeth Munsell,
Amazing Narrator
hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy, tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies, class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Elizabeth, welcome to the OT school health podcast.
Elizabeth Munsell
How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Jayson Davies
Jayson, yeah, thank you for being here. I am very excited to talk to you, because we get so many questions at the OT School House about the bot two, transitioning to the bot three, and we are diving all into that today. So I am excited. But first, I want to give you an opportunity just to share a little bit about how you came to work at Pearson,
Elizabeth Munsell
sure. Yeah, so it's a bit of a non traditional career path, but I started by getting my master's in occupational therapy at Boston University. After graduation, I was working as a school based occupational therapist for several years, mostly in elementary schools in Cambridge Public School District right outside of Boston. I was also doing some work in a community based setting for young adults transitioning into adulthood, and in a rehabilitation hospital. So I was at Spaulding rehab hospital for a while. I started teaching at Boston University in the graduate program for occupational therapy, and from there, I got really interested in going back to school to get a PhD. So I got my PhD in Rehabilitation Science from BU. I worked under Dr Wendy Koster, so she trained me in all things assessment, development related. And then after I graduated from my PhD, I got I went and did a postdoc at Northwestern and Shirley Ryan abilitylab at the Center for rehabilitation outcomes research, so more training on outcomes measurement there. And around the time I was finishing up my postdoc, I saw the Pearson job listed, and was interested in understanding what work would be like in industry, so reached out to the group at Pearson, and everything kind of fell into place from there. So I started working there in January 2023, and it's just a really nice fit with my training. And I love the work.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, that's awesome. And definitely a non traditional ot job. Like, if you tell somebody you're an OT, they don't think, Oh, you must work at Pearson developing assessment tools. But yeah, I'm sure it's a lot of fun. And what's your official role there then?
Elizabeth Munsell
So I'm the Research Director for occupational therapy assessments at Pearson. There's a few or several research directors, and we all sort of specialize in different areas of expertise. And you mentioned having OTs in an industry position being kind of unusual. I work with closely with two other OTs who are in different roles at Pearson, one's in the UK and one's in Australia. So we lovingly call ourselves OTs around the world when we when we meet together at all strange hours of the day for everybody's schedules. But yeah, it's great to have other ot colleagues at Pearson.
Jayson Davies
Awesome. And I'm sure when you jumped in in 2023 You're probably right in the thick of the bot three. Assessment is that right? Like the development
Elizabeth Munsell
of that absolutely. So it was a six year project. I came in about halfway when we were in standardization data collection for the bot three.
Jayson Davies
Wow. All right. Well, I think that is a great transition into this kind of first question here, and that is kind of what. What motivated the development of the bot three? Obviously, the bot two has been iconic for so long in occupational therapy. I never used the bot one. I don't know anything about it. But what kind of led that idea to say, hey, you know what? It's time to work on a bot three. Let's go for it,
Elizabeth Munsell
right, right? So, like I mentioned, I started in my career as a school based OT and like, that's really one of the reasons I followed my current career path, is that I really understood how important it is to have the right assessments in your hand for school based practitioners. And Batu was one of those. I used it in every day, or, you know, often in practice as an occupational therapist. It's really a staple in school settings, and it's been around for a long time, so one of the reasons we went ahead for revision was to update the norms, but also over time, we'd heard from our customers, so those are your listeners, the people who are using the bot in their daily practice. And we heard about several different areas of improvement that people were desiring. So we wanted to address limitations, like outdated norms, the need for more functional and accessible items, the desire for scores to better support clinical practice. And we also wanted to expand the age range of the test and improve the kit equipment. And then the other thing we were thinking about is introducing some flexibility into the test. So the bot three is considered to be a gold standard for motor assessment, but it can take, as I'm sure your listeners know, quite some, quite some time to administer, especially for students who have some significant motor attention challenges. So we really looked to address that also in this revision. Interesting.
Jayson Davies
I don't think any school based occupational therapist uses the entire bot, like there are subtests that more physical or more. I know physical therapists actually use them, so I know we don't typically use all them. I like to use the fine manual control, the manual coordination. Then sometimes I'll throw the bilateral coordination in there as well. When I would use it, is that pretty common from what you've you've seen and heard
Elizabeth Munsell
absolutely so that is actually one of the things that we looked to address, because we know that different disciplines tend to split up the bot in different ways, with OTs primarily focusing on those first three subtests, sometimes doing the other fine motor subtests, which is upper limb coordination, and then PTS would often do the other four gross Motor subtests, and so we do now offer for bot three a total motor composite score as well as your fine motor composite and your gross motor composite, which can be help you kind of use the bot just independently from some of the sub tests. So you can get a summary score for the first four sub tests and a summary score for the last four sub tests that are focused on fine and gross motor respectively.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, you used the word composite. It's not something we always use when we're talking about assessments, and not something we always use or when we're first coming out of out of grad school and getting into school based OT, I remember being very confused by looking at the bot to scoring for and be like, What is this composite? What does that mean? Can you just kind of give that a definition a little bit of
Elizabeth Munsell
course. Yeah. So typically, how we think about scores on standardized tests is you have your scaled score, which is like the sub test score, and then you combine those scaled scores to make composite scores. So they're composite because they're made up of other scores on the bot, we have two levels? Well, now three levels of composite scores. First are those domain level scores that combine two sub tests at a time. And so we've got two domain level scores in our fine motor section and two domain level scores in our gross motor section. Then we have the next level of composite scores for both fine and gross motor and then all of those come together for the total motor composite score. I also don't want to leave out, like, what I think is a beautiful little easter egg that we could add into the bot three for our OTs in the past. I hope this resonates with your listeners. So in the past, we offered that combined domain level score for the first two sub tests on the bot. And oftentimes people OTs would administer, like I said, the first three. And so what we did is we provided a composite score for just the first three subtests that OTs can now use and report in their documentation, so that they have a standard score that they can align with those three subtests, specifically
Jayson Davies
perfect, cool. And I know we're going to get more into the differences, but I want to kind of not let us get too far ahead of ourselves. We'll get there. You talked a little bit about the process. To what degree were school based ot practitioners actually involved in the process for developing the new norms, or maybe even helping to develop how the test came together? Yeah.
Elizabeth Munsell
So like I mentioned before, I came in halfway through this project, and as a new employee to Pearson, I was just thrilled to see the level of involvement from our actual customers, and in this case, school based OTs on the development of the new revision. They played a really big role in the development of bot three. So besides being led by two research directors who were former OTs in schools, we also conducted focus. Groups surveys and worked with an advisory board that included many school based practitioners. Early on, the outcomes of these activities really helped us determine what needed to be updated for the new test. And then school based practitioners provided feedback on things like new content and scoring, which directly shaped changes to the test, things like reducing reliance on the balance beam, adding more functional items and streamlining administration and scoring. And then when I joined the project during pilot and standardization phases of the bot three many of our field examiners were school based practitioners. The standardization sample included data from a broad range of students across the country, which was collected by school based OTs, and then lastly, ot practitioners played a major role in testing out and finalizing the components of the new bot three before we sent anything out to the printer, these practitioners got an early peek at the new test, and they gave us some feedback about anything that wasn't quite working as we intended, so that we could make sure the test was ready for publication and ready for use in practical, real world settings. Fantastic.
Jayson Davies
Always got to include the people who are going to actually be using the tool Absolutely. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about actually upgrading from the bot two to bot three. What it might look like. Does it have to happen? All that good stuff. So stay tuned. All right, we are back with Elizabeth and I want to talk about that upgrade process. As we know, school based occupational therapy, our districts have limited budgets. Things don't always move as quick as we'd like them to. But what would you say to an OT practitioner who is questioning whether or not they need to make that shift from the bot two, that they already have 50 assessment protocols in their closet, and make that shift to the bot three, right?
Elizabeth Munsell
So I definitely get that it can be a really big decision to buy new assessment, particularly when dealing with the balance of limited school budgets, like any big purchase, you want to make sure that your test is going to add value to your practice before buying it. So I'll say I've had the privilege of talking to a lot of different OTs who've either used or seen the bot three since its release, and overall, our feedback has been quite positive. There's been a lot of cool features that we added to bot three that I do think will add value to your school based practice, but I'll highlight a few of the big ones here. So the first obvious thing is that bot three offers updated representative norms, which is important for maintaining best practice standards and feeling confident in the decisions that you make. As a result of testing, we've also added some new and revised items so we have better floor and ceiling coverage, which that really just means that we get a few new items on several of the subtests that address the really low performing students and the really high performing students, so better spread and skill level on the test. Another feature that's probably received the most attention, positive attention, from school based OTs is the supplemental scores. And so I mentioned one of these earlier, but these are scores that don't require administration of any additional items on the test, but they provide a different way of looking at motor performance, in addition to those core bot scores that we're all used to seeing. So the first is called skilled manual performance, and it's that Summary Score I talked about earlier. It's got fine motor fine manual precision, fine motor integration and manual dexterity together in one score. So we know it's pretty common for OTs to focus on these subtests and their evaluations, we wanted to give you a summarized, standardized composite score for those three subtests. The other two supplemental scores take items from across the test and group them into new summary areas. And so one is called Planning and coordination, and that takes all the items across the full test that have high demand for planning and coordination, and provides a score that is specific to those motor skills. And this is really cool in development. We developed this based on data from a group of people with Developmental Coordination Disorder, and so it's especially useful for individuals with that type of motor profile. The other score is called movement fundamentals. And it takes several of the easiest items across the test and provides a criterion score to describe the student's performance. So something like emerging, developing or proficient in those areas, these are all items that really represent fundamental motor skills, so building blocks for more complex motor skills, and so it's a nice score for students who do have very delayed motor skills, especially because it's a criterion score, and so it isn't norm referenced.
Jayson Davies
Okay, sorry, really quickly, I want to ask a follow up. You mentioned that new kind of grouping that was based off of looking at scores of individuals with Developmental Coordination Disorder? Correct, yes. So what should a school based occupational therapist when they're completing that assessment? Should they only use that subgroup if they're working with a student who has a diagnosis of DCD, or can they still get information using it with all of their students?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah? Yeah, great question. So every student's an individual, and so you, and you go into your evaluation with an idea of what you're looking for, right? You have an idea of what have been the challenges and that you've seen function, their functional academics and social participation in school. And so your first and foremost, your evaluation, and what tools you use for evaluation should depend on that. What is the evaluation question at hand? What's the reason for testing? But this planning and coordination subtest because it or supplemental score, because it includes items from across the test, it really doesn't add any additional work. So it's great if you're going to end up giving the full bot to also look at that as a separate domain of motor performance that you could address in intervention or in therapy. You might also have somebody who's particularly difficult to test, which is common, and you may say, I think actually this person does their area of challenge is really more around this motor coordination piece or motor planning piece. It's okay just to pull out those items and give that set of items and get the score just for planning and coordination on the bot three. And so in that way, that is how we tried to add some flexibility. But also, just because it was developed on a DCD group does not mean it's only applicable for a DCD population. I talked to several people when we went to the OT a conference right after the bot three was released, and many of them were saying that they had students who tended to score poorly on the bot, but they didn't really feel like there was one score that could explain sort of the entire like the the nature of the motor challenges. And so what I really hope is that this is a an additional way to look at performance on the bot that might actually answer that that problem?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I love that, because in my practice, I would always use the fine motor precision. I would always use the fine motor integration. But if I did have some questions about motor coordination, that's when I would throw in. The bilateral coordination test, that's when I would throw in. I mean, I typically did the manual dexterity, but every now and then the upper body coordination of throwing and getting to see, you know, the actual movement you don't what I love about, I mean, assessments, right? We get a score, but we also get to actually see visually, like something that the test can't really pick up. You know, our eyes on the student of throwing a ball. You learn so much. But that's really cool now that there's actually a kind of a little built in sub test per se that helps you to see that
Elizabeth Munsell
exactly, and even just pulling out those items for the clinician to look at and say, Oh, they are having trouble across these items, like maybe it is motor planning and coordination that we should be looking at. In practicality, what that's going to look like, how you were describing that evaluation, Jayson, where you may add in a couple sub tests. Some of our OTs out there are going to have to learn a couple of the gross motor items and administer those to get the planning and coordination sub test. So just keep that in mind. So if you're not administering the full bot, or you and a PT aren't working together to administer the full bot in order to get the planning and coordination score, there are some gross motor items on there, so you'd want to learn those and administer those as part of your evaluation?
Jayson Davies
Okay, that brings up a question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can buy one, two, maybe even three, different versions of the bot the gross and fine. Do you have to get the full bot in order to use that one?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yes, you do. Yeah, because you need access to items across the full test. That's the same for the movement fundamental score as well.
Jayson Davies
Okay, sounds good. Thanks for letting us know. One more question about that upgrading process, potentially, are there any built in rules or guidelines to the bot two, bot three, or external guidelines that ot practitioners should be aware of when knowing when to update or if they need to update to a new assessment tool.
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah, that's the million dollar question, right? It's there aren't really hard or definitive rules on this, but there are best practice guidelines and standards that are put forth by organizations like a ot a or standards for educational and psychological testing, which recommend using the most current, validated assessment that's available. And so in this case, now it would be the bot three since it's since it's released. The reason for that is that using updated tools is the best way to ensure that you're getting an accurate, equitable and defensible evaluation, that you can feel confident making eligibility decisions around because you have these updated norms, and so you can feel confident that the student you're being Comparing to, the norms are reflected there in those norm scores. But in practice, I know that there are several factors that influence how quickly you can make the switch. So generally, Pearson continues to sell record forms for an older version of the test for some time, until we can see that many of our customers have had the opportunity to switch over to the new revision. But what I'll say is just remember that regardless of the version that of the test that you're using, always report and document the version that you're using in your evaluate evaluation reports, which is just, it's super important. For full transparency, and also just to uphold our ethical responsibility to our students,
Jayson Davies
yeah, and two quick follow ups on that. Then when you say identifying which test, that's basically just saying bot two versus just bot and bot three versus just bot. Right, exactly, right. Yes, yeah. And then you also keyed on a big something that comes up, especially more high profile districts, if you want to call them that, that defensible word like that is something that I don't know. I talked to school based ot practitioners across the globe. And for some people, that is a huge concern. They have lawyers at 10% of their IEPs, and defensible is coming up all the time for others. I know that may not be as big of a concern, but as you mentioned, right like our ethical dilemma and our ethics like within occupational therapy, kind of guide us toward using the most updated assessment
Elizabeth Munsell
tools without a doubt, and we do that for a reason. It's important that every so often you go back and you make sure that the norms that you're using to compare your student to are representative of a normative population that your student is being educated in. And that's why we have those updated norms every so often, around every 20 years. But it really depends on the nature of the assessment, what their what domains the assessment is looking at, and so for the bot, it was time for us to do that.
Jayson Davies
Great. And you know what? That's a perfect opportunity for this question, I think, is, how has the normative data been updated, changed? Did you find anything that was surprising? Was it kind of similar? Have anything to share on that?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah, yeah. So it is really important for our practitioners to think critically about like the makeup of the normative groups and standardized tests that they're comparing their students performance to. I'll say that for the bot three, the norms are based on a 2021, US Census representative sample, and so they're stratified by age, sex, race and ethnicity, region and educational classification. So that means when we went out to collect data to develop our norms. We made sure that the type of students were collecting data on were representative in all of those ways of the US Census, if you look at the tables in the manual that describes the normative samples from bot two to bot three, you can see that bot three does have more diversity, which is indicative of the more diverse population in 2021 compared to when the bot two was published. And then having, again, like having your standardized scores that are in alignment with these demographics can help practitioners feel a little more comfortable that the student that they're testing is demographically represented in the norms that they're being compared to that's really the key there. So a big change with bot three that practitioners will notice as soon as they sit down to score the test is that we no longer use combined norms. So I'm sorry, we no longer use our sex, sex based norms. We only have combined norms. So we looked at the bot data, and we saw that sex really had a negligible impact on performance at the subtest level. Some people were sort of surprised by that, because I think there was an expectation, because it historically had been part of the bot, that we would see those differences. But honestly, I think it's more of a reflection of the nature of the test items. So for example, you might expect, let's say strength, to be meaningfully different between males and females at the population level. But if you think about and look at the strength items on the bot three, we really aren't looking at measuring extreme levels of strength. The items across the bot three are really more looking at motor skills and that functional level of performance, and we don't really see sex differences in things like strength or other motor skills at that functional level looking at that aggregate sub test data. And so our standardization confirmed that finding and in a lot of ways, it's really nice. It simplifies what we're looking at, because we're just looking at the combined norms for our normative sample, male and female together. The other thing that I'll note that's different in bot three compared to bot two is that, okay, I'll admit this is like, sort of getting in the weeds, but for bot two, the sub test scores had a mean of 15, which, okay, so some people are like, I don't really care, but that's kind of unusual, right? For a standardized test, most standardized tests have a subtest mean of 10, and so we were getting feedback that it was really difficult for people to kind of look across tests and compare somebody's scores. So what we did with bot three is we changed that bot three now has a mean of 10 for our subtest scores, which is great in a lot of ways, but what it will mean is, when you're looking at your bot two and bot three data, you're looking at different numeric numbers on the scores, and so just keep that in mind when you're comparing your student from bot two to bot three, you can do things like looking at the descriptive categories or looking at the percentiles in different areas of performance to help sort of contextualize and compare their performance over time. But that is a difference that you'll notice. Gotcha, okay,
Jayson Davies
thanks for sharing about that. I know when I go to use the bot two, I know exactly what it's gonna look like. I've got my easel book up. I've got my workbook in front of the kid. I've got my block sitting to the side ready to go. Is that different at all for the bot three, are there different tools that they might need same? Does the workbook look different? Does the actual form look different?
Elizabeth Munsell
How's that? Yeah, yeah. So I'll say at first glance, and a lot of OTs that I talked with were very relieved to see this. At first glance, the bot three looks a lot like the bot two. So it is not like an unrecognizable test. It looks and feels very much similar. But as I mentioned before, with a closer look, you'll see that we tried to put in a lot of these clinically useful upgrades to the test. So you know, the test is still going to have your admin easel. It's still going to have record forms. It has an examiner manual. It has a set of manipulatives that come with the test. We also now offer an administration option on Q global with bot two we only had scoring available on Q global. Now we have an administration option, which essentially replaces your record form and your admin easel with something that comes up on your computer screen through Q global. So that is a change, but it's really an addition to the test, because we offer the traditional paper, paper and pencil options as well. Really, the changes are inside the test once you kind of delve deeper into it. So I mentioned those supplemental scores. I also am going to mention something that a lot of OTs have really resonated with, which is a new score that we offer for bot three, and it's called the growth scale values. So we talk we call them gsvs for short. So if you ever hear anybody talking about that, that's growth scale values. I want for a second your listeners just kind of think about a moment in time where they were given a revaluation for a student on their caseload who tended to be lower performing on standardized tests. So and they may feel like the norm referenced tests on the bot didn't really fully represent their improvement over time, because you're comparing them to a normative population. In that instance, I know a lot of OTs will use the total point scores to describe improvement in performance. So they'll take a sub test. You know, you've maybe done it. I know I've done it. You take a sub test score and you report how many points they got last time versus,
Jayson Davies
yeah, they're still in the second percentile, but they've got three extra total point scores.
Elizabeth Munsell
That's exactly right. So the problem is, our total point scores on standardized tests really aren't made to be psychometrically sound and reported that way. Growth scale values are our answer to that. So you can think of them as a psychometrically sound total point score. What's so great about that is that you can then measure intra individual change, so change within the student over time, and it's a great way to demonstrate progress, even for those who maybe aren't showing that progress with the norm referenced scores, that's Wow, yeah. So I'm loving those, and I'm educating people on those as much as possible, and so please reach out if you have questions about that, because I think it's really cool new feature, and one of those that kind of answers maybe some people's frustrations with standardized tests. Yeah, yeah. Beyond gsvs and some of the supplemental scores that I talked about, there are other things that are new to bot two or sorry to bot three, we expanded the age range up to 2511, we have some more items on the test. And you might say, oh my gosh, no, not more items. It's already a long test. But what we did was we looked at the data on bot two data, and we saw that that second trial that's included in several of the bot items, oh yeah, wasn't actually needed. It wasn't making a statistically different score.
Jayson Davies
Always, hold on. I always did it. I always did it. I never left it out. But I always felt like, why am I doing this?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yep, well, so what we know is that it's really about the teaching of the item, right? It's not just about the repetition doing it twice as a trial. It's making sure that the student actually knows what they're supposed to do. And so in previous versions of the bot, that second trial was really like, Okay, you got the kinks out in the first trial. Here's the real thing. But what we found is that most people are just making sure. Most of our practitioners are making sure that they the student knows how to do that item before they're asked to do it, which is exactly right. And so we took out that second trial, and we put a greater emphasis on teaching the task to examinees, and we provide a ton of different supports in the bot three test that help sort of cater to people's different teaching styles and learning styles, so that they can really learn how to do the item correctly before they're tested. So we've got that traditional teaching text. We've got, like, key points to emphasize when you're teaching the item. We have updated pictures that you guys are all used to seeing when you look at the bot, but then we also have these really cool new demonstration videos for each of the items, and those are embedded into our digital administration, but you can also pull those up separately when you're using paper and pencil. Visual version of the test and show your students that. And, yeah, I've got a second grader, and I will tell you, kids love to look at a video. So those are really great. And I encourage people to experiment though with those as a way to really quickly make sure that your student is understanding the item before they have to perform it.
Jayson Davies
You got to make a test for 2025 right? That's right, that's the truth. All right, we're going to take our second and final break, and when we come back, we're actually going to talk a little bit about how to use the bot assessment results to help with intervention planning and within your practice. So stay tuned. All right, we are back with Dr Munsell. Thank you so much for being here, and let's dive into it with this question, how does the bot three better connect assessment results to intervention planning for IEPs,
Elizabeth Munsell
yeah, so I'm gonna talk about those supplemental scores again. Really, we had that in mind when we created those scores. We wanted to give clinicians something that they could really, you know, sink their teeth into and get their hands on for clinical sort of reasoning and moving into intervention planning and so that movement fundamentals, skilled manual performance and planning and coordination, those are all scores that can provide an additional way to look at the student's performance on the test. Beyond those traditional bot scores, they can help us connect our assessment results with the more functional motor challenges that can impact student participation in school. And then I'll give another call out for gsvs, because those are really great for progress monitoring. And progress monitoring and showing the benefit and the students improvement from our intervention is obviously critical when it comes to thinking about treatment planning and what your next step is for your
Jayson Davies
student, gotcha. And would that kind of be, in a way, a similar response to a question on how we're starting to there's just, I can't talk now, there is more of an emphasis on connecting what we are doing as occupational therapy practitioners to academics. And is it those GSPs or the other scores that are helping us to do that in a way, to connect motor performance to functional, academic and social performance,
Elizabeth Munsell
right? So this is an excellent point, and it's also like a question that's very near and dear to my heart, because I've spent so much of my career thinking about participation and how to measure participation and think about participation. And so what I'll how I'll answer that is really bot three is, it is fundamentally performance based assessment, and it gives us a standardized picture of somebody's motor strengths and challenges. And so the areas that we measure on the bot three things like fine motor, precision, balance, coordination, etc, those are the underlying motor skills that can ultimately help support participation in academic and social activities. So then, how do we use this in practice? OTPs can use the bot three the results from that test to make a connection between the body functions and participation. So for example, low fine motor control may help explain difficulties that you're seeing in handwriting or manipulating classroom materials, balance and coordination, can link to challenges on the playground or even social participation on the playground. The bot three isn't a test that is going to measure participation itself, but it is providing that objective evidence base that you need to be able to map motor performance onto functional demands that are in the school, and understand what you need to enable more full participation for that student. So in that way, really think about that bot three as a bridge. It grounds our understanding in motor function so that we can actively link those findings to real world functional, academic and social participation goals that our school based practitioners are really focused on?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna ask you a tough question, and to be honest, I might end up editing this out depending on what you say right now. But was there ever a consideration to add a handwriting item to the test?
Elizabeth Munsell
I love this question. So there was we did talk about it. What we ended up doing based on feedback from school based practitioners, from our experts, from people who've been using and developing bot for years, we decided instead of doing something that is strictly handwriting, because we also know that there are so many things that underlie handwriting that are also outside of motor performance. So bot isn't really made to capture everything that goes on with handwriting. So instead, we updated the manual dexterity subtest to include a few more items that really mimicked handwriting, so they gave us a little more ecological validity in those items. We took out the a couple of the first items that were really simple and didn't really tap into, like, some skills that you would need for handwriting. We added things like drawing lines that connect a top line to the bottom line. And so any OT is going to look at that and say, Okay, those are pre handwriting skills. I'm following you there. So we get a little bit more of that, like, closer to a. Handwriting assessment. But ultimately we decided, let's keep this as a motor based assessment, and the handwriting piece, maybe you'll use a tool like the dash or you look at samples of their writing from the classroom to help contextualize what you're finding on the bot. So it's good question, and we definitely did consider
Jayson Davies
it perfect, like I said, I had not given Elizabeth that question on our questions, so I had no idea what the response was going to be. And I'm glad I asked. All right, you mentioned the dash that that people might pair the dash with the bot, bot two, bot three, whichever one they're using. What are some other assessment tools that you've heard from practitioners, or maybe you've used yourself, they kind of go well with the movement test. That is the bot,
Elizabeth Munsell
awesome question. So I think about a couple of things. So like I mentioned before, the bot is looking at more of a bottom up approach to assessment. You're looking at those component skills. Something that would go really well with the bot is something that looks a little bit more activities or participation. And so the couple of things that come to mind for me is the PD cap, which is an assessment that looks at several different domains, and it looks at the student's performance of activities. It's fast, it's quick and easy. You can give it to teachers. You can give it to parents or caregivers to respond to, and it's a great compliment to understand, okay, based on the motor performance I'm seeing and the other pieces of the evaluation that I'm pulling together, what are sort of the high level areas of challenge, obviously, the school function assessment, I got to throw that out there. It is perfectly matched to nearly, I mean, almost any student would be a great candidate for the school function assessment, because it is a laundry list of the things that students need to do to be able to participate in the daily life of a student. And so it's great to be able to contextualize what you're seeing on a motor assessment with what they're actually having challenges with in their day to day, school day that would show up on the SFA another sort of way to look at the person as a whole, and kind of what they're bringing to the activity or the environment is using the sensory profile. So the sensory profile goes really well with the bot. It helps us sort of understand, both from a motor perspective and from a sensory perspective, what is the child bringing to the picture, and then how might we want to adjust their environment, adjust the tasks that they're being asked to do, to better fit or better match that student. And then the last one I'll bring up is the movement ABC. So we just revised the movement ABC three. It has very similar characteristics of the bot because it is also a motor performance based motor test. A lot of times, people will reach for the movement ABC if they want something that's shorter or maybe more honed to a specific age group, because the movement ABC is about 10 items, and it covers three different motor domains, and it has items that are specifically designed for smaller age groups, where the bot you give all the items, and every kid, regardless of their age, has to take all the items. The movement ABC is more specific. It also comes with this really cool checklist that you don't have to do the movement ABC, motor performance piece with. You can just do the checklist on its own. And the checklist is a similarly kind of to the SFA. It has several different areas of real life performance that might be impacted by motor skills. And so you can have the teacher or a parent fill out that checklist to help give you more information that you maybe found on the bot to help contextualize what you're seeing and direct your intervention. Awesome.
Jayson Davies
And we will be sure to link to all those assessment tools so people can easily find them. And I do have to say, I'm sure I could hear them screaming at you, Elizabeth, when you were talking about the SFA, because everybody loves it, but everybody hates that is still asking about using a floppy disk. So everyone stay tuned. We have a special announcement about that coming up at the end of the podcast, so we'll wait until the end. But moving forward, what specific training we're going to kind of talk about the transition process now, what specific training would you recommend to OT practitioners that are transitioning from the bot two to the bot three to make sure that they're using it correctly? I know you mentioned some videos earlier, but how would that look for them?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah, all right, okay, you guys have to hear me out on this. I know I'm a little biased, because I make tests for a living, but I do really recommend looking at the new examiner manual, and I mean this even for people who are very familiar and could give the bot two in their sleep. The reason I say this is that even if you've administered the bot two before, a lot what we found is that a lot of the people who are really familiar with the test might skip that part of reading the manual, and then you miss a lot of this stuff that we've included in the bot three to really help you improve your clinical practice, or help you streamline your clinical practice. Like I said, at first glance, you'll look at the bot three, you'll be like, Okay, a couple new items. I can do this. But if you take a chance to maybe look at the manual, you can also practice the new administration on Q global. So go. Ahead and just sign up for an account and take a look at what it looks like on that on screen administration. Get out those administration easels. Make sure you're reading through the Administration section of the manual to better understand, like, what are the new standardized requirements for the bot three? All of those are going to help. We also, at Pearson provide a lot of additional training. You can. We have all kinds of webinars. We have Q global tutorials, we have sample reports, and all of that is on the resources links on the bot three page of the Pearson assessments website. And then you can also always reach out to us if you have any questions about getting to know your new bot.
Jayson Davies
Three perfect. And what about for practitioners who may be you know, covid 19 happened, and a lot of people either a they left school based OT, obviously, they're probably not listening to this, this conversation, but they went and found a hybrid job, or they went and found a teletherapy job, and they just stayed with it, because that's what we do for those people who are providing evaluations over telehealth. Do you have any advice for them? Any wisdom for them?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah. So as we look ahead, I can see the bot three really evolving in this way even more. But right now, we do have additional supports, like I said, as the digital administration that's available on Q global, it's a great way to be able to get more into doing an hybrid administration. We also published on the Pearson website telehealth recommendations for how you would administer the bot three in a hybrid setting. And I'll just be very frank, there are some subtests that lend itself really well to that, and there are others that don't lend itself as well to remote administrations. One area, I think, of growth as we look forward with the bot three, as we're trying to keep up with the evolving scene of school based occupational therapy and occupational therapy in general, is that we're looking to identify really the right technologies that can be used so that we can support the aspects of the test that don't lend themselves as well right now to a hybrid model or a telehealth model. I'll put in a plug. One of the ways that we do this at Pearson is the folks who work on ot products are really looking to hear from ot practitioners to understand what their needs are in the clinical setting and how that's evolving. We hold pretty regular OT and PT forums, where we ask questions about what your needs are and try to get an idea of what you guys are thinking about and what ot practitioners want in terms of digital advances and things like that too. So keep an eye out for those, and we'd love to hear from you.
Jayson Davies
Is it logistically sound to say that the bot to when you're reporting it, that it is standardized if you're able to do it over a teletherapy model.
Elizabeth Munsell
So no, we didn't collect any data using a teletherapy model. We did it all in person, and so the standardized procedures are in person, following what we have in our standardization in our manual that talks about the administration guidelines and walks through each item. So if you were to use it in that way, you can always cite the high the telehealth document that we have on pearson.com to talk about the following best practice guidelines to administer it via telehealth. And then, like everything you know, we're flexible in clinical practice, things are not standardized at all times, and so please document that and let people know that I did not administer this as a standardized approach, but I followed the best practice guidelines. And you know, here are the reasons why we can feel confident in the findings, or here are the reasons why we may have to take these findings with a grain of salt and provide a little more information
Jayson Davies
that totally makes sense. I'm glad that there is that additional resource on the website to kind of help us, but that, to a degree, isn't un similar or dissimilar to what we do when we're in actual practice. I mean, I know that there have been times that I put on a report look, I used the bot two, but technically, I can't say it was standardized, because I had to give more instruction. I had to do this. I had to do that. The student needed more practice. La, dee da, dee da, so in a sense, I think it would be kind of like that,
Elizabeth Munsell
right. That's exactly right. And we tried to, sort of, with the bot three, with this revision, we tried to identify some of the places where people were very often saying, like, I couldn't follow a standardized approach. And we tried to address that, or add additional flexibility, like I said earlier, about teaching the items and things like that. But there are always going to be things in clinical practice that just aren't standardized. Things don't always go as planned. People aren't planned. People aren't predictable. People are complicated, and so it is exactly what we would recommend for any time that you wouldn't follow the exact standardization procedures on a test
Jayson Davies
perfect and you can still get so much information from it, so you get so much just by watching, yeah, yeah. All right. But earlier, I asked you a question about, like, why ot practitioners should potentially move forward to the bot three, from the bot two, you know, and we talked about that for a little bit. I actually want to give you the opportunity now to kind of flip the script a little bit and, you know, pretend you're, you are that school based OT, and you got to convince your administrator a little bit. How are you going to do that? How are you going to convince your administrator to spend a few $1,000 on this new test that kind of is already in the closet, just an older version of it, right?
Elizabeth Munsell
Right? So when I think about this question, I really think about it as a question of communicating the value and the quality of the new bot three so in terms of value, OT, practitioners can point to all the things that we discussed today, improved accessibility, new clinically relevant supplemental scores, enhanced progress monitoring with gsvs. Another practical selling point is that it is comprehensive but also flexible. So instead of needing multiple motor assessments, you can you really answer many different motor evaluation questions using the bot three in terms of value and qua sorry, in terms of quality. We talked a little less about this, but there is extremely strong evidence for the reliability and the validity of the new test, which is absolutely critical for a high quality standardized test. You know, I guess this is another plug to look at that manual, because we do a lot of initial validation studies and reliability studies. We look at different clinical populations, and we report all of that in the manual, and the summary of it is that we found that it is very it's it works great in clinical groups. It's reliable on retest and across different raters, and so you can be confident that you're using an extremely high quality test. And then lastly, I think that every ot practitioner out there should try to emphasize that the updated and Representative norms on the new bot three are really essential for making sure that we make equitable, fair intervention decisions and decisions about whether or not people receive services, and so reminding your administrators that we do have that responsibility to try to get to the newest test as soon as possible, and that there's a real reason why those are really the key, the key features for selling the bot three to your administrator,
Jayson Davies
perfect. Thanks. That'll be very helpful for many ot practitioners, I'm sure. All right. Thank you so much for all of your time. Elizabeth, we're going to start to wrap up here, but I have three somewhat I think are going to be fun questions that I want to end with. I alluded to one a little bit earlier that we're going to talk about, but the first one is when you talk to OT practitioners about the bot three, obviously you're excited about that. We can hear it in your voice. But what are ot practitioners most surprised by, most excited by, when it comes to the bot three?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah, so I will say it is really I've been thrilled because it's a lot of different features. I will the new supplemental scores really seem to have landed in terms of what we're needing out there, clinically, the GSB seem to have really answered a needed question, a really a needed problem about, how do we show improvement in our students, especially when they're not scoring anywhere close to what would be within that average range for other their norm group. I didn't mention this earlier, and this is sort of maybe, maybe a silly one for some but maybe not. One of the things we did is for the balance beam sub test, we removed the balance beam and so now those are just offered as supplemental items, and you can administer the balance sub test completely on the floor. And that was really answering questions that we heard or, you know, needs that we heard from our users who said, We really need this test to be better suited for people with lower levels of performance. And so that's just an example of one way we tried to address that they and people seem to their backs, seem to thank us, because that's a heavy balance beam, and people seem to like that change the attention to those who really are may have difficulty completing the bot. Two, those are three things that come to mind. But I'd also love to hear from people if they find other things that they're really excited about when they start using the bot.
Jayson Davies
Three, absolutely, yeah. And Elizabeth, really quickly. I still have two more questions, but where's the best place for people to actually get in touch with you
Elizabeth Munsell
so you can reach out to your Pearson Assessment Consultant, and you can find that on our pearsonassessments.com website, they're regional assessment consultants, and they can answer so many questions, and they'd love to hear your feedback on bot three. If you want to talk to me directly, you can always ask them to be connected with me, and I'm very happy to respond to to questions and thoughts about that. You can also find me on LinkedIn. And then I'll just also encourage people, when they're going to find their Assessment Consultant, check out the bot three page, because a lot of the resources that I mentioned today, and even more are posted there. And so we've got some really cool webinars that talk about comparing the bot three to other assessments. And also just. What's new with the bot three and how to use the bot three digitally. And we even have something up there around those growth scale values and those new scores too. So check it out.
Jayson Davies
All right. Perfect. And for the final two questions, how do you see assessment tools changing in the next decade or so? Obviously, we use assessment tools as school based ot practitioners, but you are literally, like, have the power. No, I'm just kidding, like you are the one creating them or helping to create them. Obviously, it's not all your decision. But where do you see assessment tools changing over time? Obviously, we've seen changes the last 1020, years. Kind of what do you foresee?
Elizabeth Munsell
Oh, well, I love that. I wish I had the power. But, you know, I do have the ability to advocate for what I think is the next move in assessment, and in order to do that, well, we like, like to keep our one foot in the door with our OT practitioners and really understand what their needs are. So for sure, we try to advocate for you and what you guys want. Where I see it going. I mean, it would be remiss for me not to talk about AI, right? It's just giant and it's everywhere. And so we're seeing anything from Ai scoring of drawings to video capture, AI motion capture AI for the more performance based tests doing real life, sort of like ambient capture of people's movement in daily life, and developing and deriving ways to score that it is truly Pandora's box of options. And at Pearson, we're really working on, sort of looking through and seeing what will resonate most with our customers and what is also going to be of the very highest quality, because our tests are used in high stakes settings, and we want to make sure what we put out is of the utmost quality. But I'm super excited to see where things go. I feel super fortunate to be sort of on the inside of understanding where we're going with assessments. And yeah, we want to keep bringing new things to you for sure, I
Jayson Davies
just wanted to say I told you so to everyone listening, because I have been telling people for the longest time now that I know Pearson's gonna do something they're gonna have to, like AI is just whatever it becomes, is going to be a way to help us get scores better, get scores easier. And, yeah, I had no idea that was coming, but I'm excited. And it, I know it's not going to come soon enough. That's my biggest like, I wish they could be here now, but yeah, I
Elizabeth Munsell
make absolutely zero promises here, and this is really just my musings on where we could be going in assessment. So you know, don't take my word as like,
Jayson Davies
gonna be Elizabeth, whoever, whoever your boss is, needs to listen to this whatever minute of the podcast and make it happen. All right. Final question, I alluded to it a little bit earlier. Are there any other updated assessment tools coming soon from Pearson?
Elizabeth Munsell
Yes, well, you did give a little teaser on the school function assessment. So we have started. We're in the very, very early phases of development for the school function assessment too. Eventually, you know, we're going to go through a very similar development process. We're going to hear from what school based practitioners want, and we're going to update and get rid of that floppy disk item. Because we put out a survey, and the number one thing people said was get rid of the floppy disk items. So that's heard loud and clear. But we're gonna make other updates to bring that into, you know, 2020 whenever we decide it's time to publish that that thing. But we're so excited, we'll be looking for examiners to help us collect data for the standardization sample of that test. And so, you know, always keep an eye on the Pearson website. You know, when those emails come up in your inbox, a lot of times we're looking specifically for OTs. So keep an eye out for that. And if you would be interested in helping collect data for SFA, we would love to have you. The other test that some OTs may be familiar with and others maybe not so much is the Vineland test, which is an adaptive behavior measure, and so we're working on a revision for that still along, you know, in the very early phases of development. But if you have experience with Vineland, or if you're interested in Vineland, it might be a good time to take a look at it and sort of think about if that could be useful to you, or if you'd be interested in doing data collection for
Jayson Davies
that project. Perfect. To everyone listening, be sure to subscribe to OT squad newsletter, because I see these emails sometimes, and I just like, take their link, take their paragraph, and I plug it into my newsletter to make sure that you know that, hey, they're looking for OTs to help collect data, or, Hey, they have a survey about how to make the m not the infant, sorry, how to make the SFA better. So I try and let you know in my newsletter as well, you can learn more about that at ot schoolhouse.com/newsletter, with that, Elizabeth, I want to say thank you so much for all your information. I couldn't imagine learning more about. About the bot three, at least for what I need in order to move forward with, with starting to learn more about actually getting it and and using it. So thank you so much. We really appreciate that. Is just pearson.com the best place for people to go to learn more about the bot three.
Elizabeth Munsell
Yeah, Pearson assessments.com and thanks Jayson for having me. I love talking about this. Obviously, I'm like, super pumped about the new revision, and hopefully I'll be able to come back and talk about other tests in the future. I'm, you know, thinking about SFA, so hopefully we'll talk again.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, that would be brilliant. We'll set a date five years from now. Does that sound right? That's probably a comfortable date. Yeah. All right. All right. August 28 we'll say there. Okay. Elizabeth, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, and I look forward to staying in touch. Have a good one. You too. All right, that concludes our deep dive into the bot three with Dr Elizabeth Munsell, I want to extend my sincerest thank yous to Elizabeth for sharing her expertise and insider knowledge about this assessment that we all use and really know that we should be using when we need standardized assessments, her insights on the supplemental scores, growth, scale, values, and practical tips for transitioning from the bot two to the bot three are especially helpful to us all. If you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to join the OTs cross collaborative where we regularly discuss assessment tools, intervention strategies and documentation approaches just like this, the collaborative offers exclusive resources, professional development opportunities and direct mentorship from myself to help elevate your school based occupational therapy practice, whether you're struggling with evaluation reports, need help justifying services or just want to connect with like minded ot practitioners. We've built this community for you. You can learn more and join us inside the OT school house collaborative at ot schoolhouse.com/collab that's ot school house.com/c. O, L, L, A, B, collab. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the OT school house Podcast. I'm Jayson Davies, and I'll catch you in the next episode where we will, of course, continue exploring topics that matter most to school based ot practitioners like you and me. I'll see you next time. Take care.
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