Elizabeth Peña receives Excellence in Diversity Award

August 30, 2022

Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity Elizabeth Peña received the Excellence in Diversity Award by the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CAPCSD). Recipients of this award are individuals or academic programs that have made a significant contribution to increasing the presence of under-represented populations in the field of communication sciences and disorders. She was recognized at the CAPCSD annual conference in Portland this year.

Peña is a certified speech-language pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Her work on test development for bilinguals has focused on assessment of semantic skills using a battery of related tasks. Because typical vocabulary tests rely on knowledge of specific vocabulary items, children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds often perform below age expectations, leading to misdiagnosis. The bilingual semantics test tasks are designed to allow responses that reflect cultural knowledge and allow children to respond in Spanish, English, or both. Outcomes of these efforts have resulted in publication of the Dynamic Assessment and Intervention: Improving Children's Narrative Abilities protocol and the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment test.

Elizabeth Peña

CAPCSD is a membership organization with more than 330 communication sciences and disorders programs from the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Puerto Rico and New Zealand. Member programs offer degrees in communication sciences and disorders – including undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs. CAPCSD continues to grow and develop resources and programming to support members in the discipline.