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    Mom2277 Offline OP
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    My six year-old kindergartener has significant fine-motor delays. After, and despite 4 years of occupational therapy, her fine-motor skills are in the 1st percentile. At the same time, she is doing very well with roughly fourth-grade math. (We home school, so I do math orally.) I think she has considerable math aptitude and would love to find a math achievement test that measures her math ability, not her inability to write the answers.

    Any suggestions?

    Thank you!

    Last edited by Mom2277; 05/22/12 01:00 PM.
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    You might consider having her do the initial assessment for ALEKS 4th grade maths (http://www.aleks.com ); this involves entering answers using the keyboard, or for a few questions using a mouse (can't remember how much of that there is in the 4th grade course; probably not much). ALEKS costs, but you could do the initial assessment within the context of the free trial (and of course she might love it enough to persuade you to pay for it!)

    Actually if you think she's covered most of 4th you might want to assess her with the 5th grade course. At this stage, each course includes all previous ones, so someone with full mastery of 3rd grade maths gets 70% or so (I forget what, but you can work it out from the topic lists) on the 4th grade initial assessment; it doesn't mean they know 70% of 4th grade maths! I think the assessment process is well designed, and found it quite informative at these earlier levels. (Later it works less well, because even with intelligence about what depends on what it gets to be impossible for them to test everything in the initial assessment, so the child can know something but not get it marked as known in the assessment just because no questions relevant to it were asked.)


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    Mom2277 Offline OP
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    Thank you for the info.

    I appreciate that it does an assessment, but I'm hoping to find an achievement test that I could submit to Davidson, assuming her scores seem competitive.


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    My DS was given portions of the WJ-III as a kindergartner, but I think the school psychologist let him verbally give her some of the answers. She also let him use a whiteboard, I think. I don't think my DS completed all the sections, if I remember correctly, but he did enough to get the broad math score.

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    I've found this to be one of the most challenging areas of dealing with a fine motor disability - our ds has not had any trouble at all showing his understanding of conceptual math on achievement tests, but timed fluency tests are beyond impossible to score highly in percentile on due to his difficulties with handwriting. The WJ-III Tests of Achievement are a mix of oral and written response, but only the three tests labeled "fluency" (reading, writing and math) are timed, so those are the tests that are *most* impacted by his disability. (Note: the subtests that require written responses but aren't timed are also impacted significantly enough that they don't represent his full knowledge by a long shot). Our neuropsych has told us that there are two forms of the WJ-III Achievement Tests (a form "a" and form "b") and that one way to gauge his knowledge on the fluency tests or other written response tests would be to give him the alternate form using oral response in place of written response. You could ask Davidson if they would accept that type of accommodation, given the documentation you have from your ds' OT evaluations.

    The alternative is to submit a portfolio rather than achievement testing, which I suspect you could do since you are homeschooling and he's working 2+ years ahead of grade level in math.

    Last note, if you ever want to know for your own information where your child is at, I second the suggestion to use the ALEKS testing - it's tied directly to each state's curriculum, and we've found it was one of the most useful pieces of data we had when advocating for our ds' subject acceleration in math. The assessment is all done on the computer, and it's not timed.


    Good luck!

    polarbear


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