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    Joined: Oct 2011
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    Good info above, but here's an alternative hypothesis, because there are a few statements here that are red flags for me:

    "she is making slow progress with her reading and her writing."

    Ummm... we're talking about K, right? And a kid who scored in the upper 90-percentiles on all assessments, cognitive and achievement? I mean, how much reading and writing is there, really, in K?

    "She has shown signs of being disengaged and her teacher feels she is finding it all overwhelming."

    "[the school] does have a very high academic standard"

    I've seen it all too often that when a school says it has "a very high academic standard," that's a coded message for "We are severely drill-and-kill. We will overload your children with practice both in class and at home, and they will learn to hate learning." Place a younger-age (less EF, less tolerance for boredom), truly gifted (eager to LEARN) child in such an environment, and you can easily check off all the boxes:

    [x] Disengaged
    [x] Overwhelmed
    [x] Struggling (apparently)

    Testing this hypothesis also requires you to go to the school, meet with the teacher, see the work that is being done, and dig into how your DD's day is being spent.

    Another alternative hypothesis...

    Your child's social well-adjustment may be a product of dumbing herself down and working below her true knowledge level. My DD attempted something exactly like this in her K year. She was fooling her teacher, but she didn't fool us. It was very difficult for DD to convince us she didn't know how to write an "M" when her play room was decorated with scraps of paper containing full, beautifully-formed phrases she'd written at least a full year prior.

    Extroverted, gifted girls will often be caught in a conflict between their very powerful social and cognitive needs. For my DD10, satisfying both has been a constant struggle for the entire family.

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    Dubsyd Offline OP
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    Thanks for all of your responses.

    Originally Posted by polarbear
    If your dd's teacher has a concern that she is not keeping up and in over her head re the expectations for K, and is recommending she repeat K, they need to offer some quantitative evidence supporting their concerns.


    She is on a reading level 5, but only just. I forgot to ask at the last meeting what the range is and what the minimum expectation is at the end of K. I know from parents at other schools that for some schools the minimum is a 6 at the end of K, and other schools expect a 10. I do know they ability group students for literacy and DD goes with the group that goes to the support teacher. They also are expected to write a couple of descriptive sentences about things they have done, and DD struggles with this. I will be sure to ask about reading levels at the next meeting.

    Originally Posted by polarbear
    The parent's response was to switch back to public school to avoid having her child repeat K, and she had her child tutored over the summer by a reading specialist in an attempt to be sure her child wasn't behind peers in reading ability in first grade. What happened, in her case, was that the reading specialist found there was truly a learning challenge. But that's just one child in one situation. My experience as the parent of kids with 2e is that recognizing and deciphering reading challenges in young children is difficult due to the wide range of "typical" reading development plus the vary wide range of skills needed to read.


    Yes this can be tricky. The psychologist said DD showed some potential signs of various types of Dyslexia, but that these signs were also common in early readers, and recommended that we keep an eye on how DD progresses. I certainly don't want to hold her back because of a LD.

    Originally Posted by Platypus101
    I am a bit confused, though, trying to reconcile those extremely high reading-skills achievement scores with reading problems? Not sure what I am missing in terms of where she is having difficulty. If she can demonstrate specific skills at that kind of level, yet struggles to read in practice, that suggests you want to try and figure out what is different in the two scenarios. Vision, maybe, as a quasi-random thought? I don't know what the WJ tests look like, but I do know there's a big difference, if you have vision issues, between reading busy text vs reading single words on flashcards (with our reading remediation program, my DD almost never makes mistakes on the latter). Can you talk to tester, teachers, and from your own experience, and figure out what, exactly, is different from the tasks she performed on the WJ and the regular reading where you see struggle?


    I think this is important too. I am not sure if perfectionism is playing a part here. With the math program they use, she was loving it the first time she tried it, until she got one wrong. Then she refused to do any more. I thought we had moved a bit past that, but she was doing the math last weekend, and she again wanted to stop when she made a mistake. So obviously an area for us to work on. I am wondering if this is causing her to resist reading instruction at school since it is challenging for her. She might just say, it's too hard, I can't do it instead of trying. That is another common thing for her, to avoid tasks that she finds challenging.

    Vision is another possible issue. Thanks for your comments aeh. She has seen two behavioural optometrists. The first found tracking issues, and just wanted her to wear prism glasses, the second also found tracking and fatigue issues, and wanted further assessment and probably vision therapy, which we are not pursuing at the moment due to time and money constraints. She does wear prism glasses at school now. We will be consulting with an educational psychologist next week, and I plan to ask her opinion on vision therapy. I know many families here have seen great results with vision therapy.

    Dude - your comments are interesting. I know within the family dynamic DD established herself as the non academic one. She would often ask me to stop talking when DS had asked a question about something and I was explaining the answer. I am not sure about the dumbing herself down for peers, but I do think she has partly formed her school identity in contrast to DS. Unfortunately she also compares herself with him and thinks he is much 'smarter'.

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    What is level 5? Is it DRA or PM which are about the same, or something else? If it were here i would ask for a 1/2 (K/1) composite. They usually ability group at that level and she would be mid age range. Then you could decide what year she was later. Is something like that possible.

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    ndw Offline
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    This document breaks down the skill expectations to be achieved in K, 1 and 2. It mentions RR level 9 which I assume is reading recovery level but there are many different systems.

    http://www.earlyactionforsuccess.com.au/pdf/Benchmarking2013.pdf

    I read a bit of the literature on repeating some time ago and it is not generally recommended even for students who are struggling as there is often little to be gained staying back.

    If your DD is happy in that peer group I would stay with them while investigating and supporting any specific learning difficulties. To build self efficacy challenge is important. Your DD is young and she is learning to learn, how to meet a challenge and work through it. Lowering challenge through repeating won't necessarily be beneficial to self efficacy. Doing well on easy tasks contributes little to learning, meeting a challenge does.

    Having said that, it can be a fine line between good struggle and hurtful struggle so I understand your concern. She doesn't sound as though she is falling behind though and developmental growth can occur in big leaps so you may find she takes off at some point.

    I helped in my DDs class in kindergarten. There were kids struggling to learn their letters. None were held back and all were reading by end of year 1.

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    Originally Posted by Dubsyd
    Dude - your comments are interesting. I know within the family dynamic DD established herself as the non academic one. She would often ask me to stop talking when DS had asked a question about something and I was explaining the answer. I am not sure about the dumbing herself down for peers, but I do think she has partly formed her school identity in contrast to DS. Unfortunately she also compares herself with him and thinks he is much 'smarter'.

    Oh, yeah, lovely sibling dynamics. I didn't realize that was in play here, because that tends to play a BIG role. Knowing this now, I'd suggest that this is the primary area to focus. I assume your DS is the older one. Younger siblings tend to look for space that the older ones are not occupying as a way to compete for parental approbation. So if DS has "the smart one" role locked down, she might abandon that role and look to "the athletic one", "the musical/artistic one", "the funny one," etc.

    The way I would confront this is with counter-messaging, sometimes direct, sometimes discreet. So I might directly mention DD's test scores to her, and present them as the reason I unshakably know that if she wanted to, she could do great. And I'd point out that DS is just as smart as she is, he's just been at this learning game longer. Discreetly, I'd have a conversation with my spouse within DD's earshot discussing a study which shows that second children often turn out to be smarter than their older siblings, but are often afraid to show it (whether I actually find such a study to discuss is irrelevant wink ).

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    The research on retention generally finds it to be helpful to achievement in the short-term, but not in the long-term, and detrimental emotionally, especially to boys, with significantly higher dropout rates in adolescence. It also tends to mask learning difficulties that would be better served with targeted remediation or accommodation, resulting in children with exceptionalities having to struggle unidentified for longer.

    In this case, it is possible that, not only is the younger sibling taking the "non-academic" role to avoid poaching on older sib's territory, but she may be doing so as a coping mechanism, in the interests of a coherent storyline for herself that explains academic struggles that she intuits are discrepant.

    So in addition to counter-messaging, obtaining additional data to explain cognitive and academic intra-individual differences may be helpful. For example, was her WJ cognitive uniform across subtests, or were some scores much lower?


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    [quote=aeh
    In this case, it is possible that, not only is the younger sibling taking the "non-academic" role to avoid poaching on older sib's territory, but she may be doing so as a coping mechanism, in the interests of a coherent storyline for herself that explains academic struggles that she intuits are discrepant.

    So in addition to counter-messaging, obtaining additional data to explain cognitive and academic intra-individual differences may be helpful. For example, was her WJ cognitive uniform across subtests, or were some scores much lower? [/quote]

    ITA with aeh on this - and one other thing I'd note. I'd give some weight to the teacher having concerns. When my ds was in early elementary, it was so easy for me to pass off on signs that he had a challenge and remarks from teachers simply because I knew how smart he was - it was obvious from what I saw at home and what he said when he talked. The thing was, the teachers' observations also were very spot-on, even though they didn't point to high intelligence. A teacher spends a great deal of the day with our kids. If a teacher feels a child is overwhelmed, chances are *something * is up.

    There was a question somewhere above also re why would the WJ-III Achievement scores be so high if there was a challenge. aeh did a wonderful job explaining how that can happen, I just wanted to mention that this *exact* thing happened with my dd who has vision issues. She was absolutely struggling to read, but had very solidly high, consistent, WJ-III Achievement scores. You could see a glimpse of her vision issues in her WISC scores, however, where she had an extremely large dip in two subtests that relied on visual discrimination.

    Best wishes,

    polarbear

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    Dubsyd Offline OP
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    That link was very useful ndw. Thanks. You are all giving me great ideas to consider.


    Originally Posted by aeh
    So in addition to counter-messaging, obtaining additional data to explain cognitive and academic intra-individual differences may be helpful. For example, was her WJ cognitive uniform across subtests, or were some scores much lower?


    DD looked fairly level when her tests were divided into three broad abilities. But looking at the actual subtests, I do see some variation. Maybe you could see if anything of note jumps out at you aeh? The report has subtests listed under a variety of clusters, with some subtests included in more than one cluster, so I am not sure the best way to organise them here for analysis, but I will list them. NOTE: scores removed for privacy

    Rapid picture naming was definitely low.

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    Ours is level 12 on your sixth birthday (will have been at school exatly 12 months as everyone starts on their fifth birthday) so I would say level 5 after a whole year is very low but not unheard of.

    If you hold her back no can she skip if she does suddenly surge forward?

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    That is a considerable amount of variation, spanning over 2.5 SD, with certain clusters diverse enough to make the cluster score less representative of her true ability.

    The Verbal Ability cluster is a combination of verbal comp and general info, which encompass an 18 pt range, over an SD. I would be concerned that expectations of MG-ness are an underestimate of her verbal reasoning ability.

    Thinking Ability is derived from four smaller clusters: long-term retrieval, visual-spatial thinking, auditory processing, and fluid reasoning. (The component subtests are listed in pairs in your post, beginning with retrieval fluency.) FR has more weight in the TA score than the other areas do, which is why the TA score is not a simple average. There is some diversity among these subtests, but not a huge amount, as, though it spans just over an SD across the whole TA cluster, each of the clusters is relatively consistent internally. Long-term retrieval and visual-spatial are the weakest, in the high average range, and fluid reasoning the strongest, on the border of superior and very superior.

    Cognitive Efficiency includes visual matching, decision speed, numbers reversed, memory for words (the processing speed and short-term memory clusters, respectively; I've listed them in pairs here). The range of subtest scores is relatively tight.

    Where we get into some differences is in the Cognitive Fluency cluster (which was not reported), consisting of retrieval fluency, decision speed, and rapid picture naming. This cluster includes two of the lower subtest scores, and one of the higher ones, resulting in a range approaching 2 SDs. For her lowest, rpn, she was required to track across multiple lines on a page, naming images of familiar objects. This is not unlike what fluent readers do, once they are word calling, and not phonetically decoding every word. In rf, she listed as many words as she could in the allowed time, given a specific category. Usually kids with deep vocabularies (see her verbal comp score) do fairly well on this. We know from other data that the words are there, so this score suggests that her access to them is the gating item. She did well on decision speed, which does not require much in terms of retrieval skills, since the images are all provided. This task is different from the other two, in that it emphasizes reasoning (visual associations), rather than retrieval.

    The pattern across this cluster suggests to me that retrieval efficiency in general is a vulnerability, and especially so when crossing visual and verbal modes, which has implications for reading. Though I am less concerned about visual tracking after seeing the strong scores in visual matching and decision speed, how much of a factor it is is still unclear, so that's definitely a rule-out I would pursue.

    If you choose to pursue additional assessment, you may wish to consider measures of reading fluency (though you may have to wait a bit for those, as many of them are not normed for 5 yos, since most 5 yos are not reading; the PAL-II does include kindergarten norms). And, though the phonological processing tasks administered look pretty good, there are other aspects of PP that could be questionable, (specifically rapid naming) which might show up more strongly on a more comprehensive measure of PP, such as the CTOPP-2. (You have data that show this already, but in the event of an institution needing additional documentation, that would be one place to turn.)


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