Right before the school year ended, I was provided the opportunity to try iTap with my students and write up this review for YOU. Test of Articulation and Phonology (iTAP), is a fully standardized assessment tool. It was normed off of monolingual English speakers from Texas. Although Smarty Ears provided the app for me to review, the opinions in this post are all mine. This app is very user friendly and I love that it a standardized assessment requiring no protocol.
One of the things I noticed (and loved) when I first opened up the app to input student’s data is that it asks about any dialectal influences. I have never seen this on any of my other assessment apps and thought it was brilliant!
When administering the app, you can leave the word as it is or flip it around so that the picture is facing the student and the word is facing you! Personally, I do not keep track on the app as I administer. I found it easiest to use the recording button and scratch down notes on a spare piece of paper. After the student leaves, I go back and take data on the actual app as I listen to the recordings and compare to my notes on paper. When you click on the targeted sound that a student makes an error on, the app provides you options on what could have happened. I absolutely LOVE that with consonant clusters, it allows you to mark the one sound that was in error. Other apps that I have just let me mark the cluster as wrong and maybe state it was a reduction or note that it was a substitution and what sort of substitution in the notes section. This app goes beyond that to be more specific plus it still includes a notes section and I LOVE that! This app also includes multisyllabic words! 
I note the errors on the app after students leave so that students who are hyperaware of data collection do not become upset while testing. In the settings, you are also able to switch the displayed errors from red to bold print which may make it not as obvious for the students also. Settings also allows you to decide if you want the written word displayed at all, or if you want to have feedback (voice or a tone) between presentation of visual stimuli. If you put your name on the evaluators section of setting, it will also automatically place it in the report that it creates for you. Once the assessment is complete and errors have been documented, the app does the rest! It will figure out for you the standardized score and percentage of correct at each word position and write up a report. I usually print out the report that it provides to have a hard copy of the data (sort of like a protocol). It is easy enough to share the information via email, Smarty Ears Therapy Report Center, and/or dropbox.This is a wonderful tool to have in my assessment arsenal; however, it is just one tool. To provide families with the most detailed and insightful information, we should include such information in our report but we must have other information to support it (other assessment results, observations, parent and teacher report, etc..). Therefore, I email the hard copy to myself and include the necessary information in my full report.
Why do I love this app? It is super user friendly and includes the manual, detailed marking for errors, multisyllabic words, and is standardized!
What suggestions do I have for improvement? This app really thought of it all. All the suggestions I had were already considered. For example, I thought having percentages of correction for multisyllabic words would be helpful. However, it already has it! This app will tell you what percent correct the student has at 3-syllable, 4-syllable, and 5-syllable words.
Overall Impressions: I am super excited to use this app for the upcoming school year for progress monitoring and assessment purposes! This is a wonderful assessment tool and I love all that it offers and that it is standardized!
