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    Joined: Feb 2014
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    Aufilia Offline OP
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    I recently requested an IEP evaluation from our school for my DS, currently 8y 3m, and in 3rd grade, based on diagnosis of dyslexia and dysgraphia by a private evaluated. (He was also previously diagnosed with ADHD, about 3 years ago, and is medicated though one could wish he was less impulsive than he still is.)

    In our meeting the new school psych INSISTED up and down that he has no reading issues and variations in his test scores are just "ADHD distraction." Now I'm pretty sure he wasn't very distracted, the evaluator's write-up would've mentioned it, and anyway, my son apparently had a blast in testing and even asked to go do it again. But the school can only see that he's reading on grade level and (in part thanks to 1 year of private OT) his handwriting is fairly legible--even though he HATES to write and drags his feet horribly.

    What do you think of these scores? Is this as strong a case for stealth dyslexia as I understand it to be? I mean, some of his reading-related scores are well below his grade equivilent--Kindergarten or 1st grade. But I know GEs are iffy things. The school denied the IEP evaluation but said they will do in-house testing and provide classroom accomodations for whatever they find. The school psych insisted he could NOT have dyslexia since his reading comprehension and pseudoword reading is so good. She was especialy obsessed with the pseudoword decoding business and his oral reading fluency which (without comprehension components) is quite good. And she was 125% convinced that his only problem was ADHD/paying attention to the test. But did she say that because his results are ACTUALLY just random, or is this a pattern that says "dyslexia!" that she was unaware of/ignoring?

    Scores from outside eval:

    WISC-V:
    FSIQ: 138
    GAI: 141
    The indexes are all at 99%-99.9%, except Processing Speed, which is 82%.

    NEPSY-II:
    Comprehension of Instructions: SS 10, %ile 50th

    BEERY:
    VMI: SS 97
    Visual Perception: SS 120
    Motor Coordiantion: SS 88

    WIAT-III:
    Composite Indices SS Percentiles
    Mathematics 108 70th
    Math Fluency 91 27th
    Written Expression 98 45th
    Basic Reading 103 58th

    WIAT-III Subtests SS / %iles / Grade Equivalencies
    Numerical Operations 105 63rd 4:4
    Math Problem Solving 108 70th 4:9
    Math Fluency – Addition 96 39th 2:8
    Math Fluency – Subtractio 87 19th 2:3
    Math Fluency – Multiplica 91 27th 3:5
    Alphabet Writing Fluency 90 25th 2:0
    Spelling 91 27th 2:5
    Sentence Composition 111 77th 7:2
    Sentence Combining 125 95th --
    Sentence Building 95 37th --
    Essay Composition 97 42nd 3:9
    Early Reading Skills 86 18th 1:7
    Word Reading 105 63rd 4:2
    Pseudoword Decoding 103 58th 4:6
    Reading Comprehension 103 58th 5:0

    Composite Indices / SS / Percentiles
    Phonological Awareness / 110 / 75th
    Phonological Memory / 95 / 37th
    Rapid Naming / 98 / 45th

    CTOPP-2 Subtests / SS / AE / GE
    Elision / 15 / >14-09 / >9:7
    Blending Words / 12 / >14-09 / >9:7
    Phoneme Isolation / 7 / 6-06 / 1:4
    Memory for Digits / 11 / 9-00 / 4:0
    Nonword Repetition / 7 / 5-03 / K:2
    Rapid Digit Naming / 9 / 7-03 / 2:2
    Rapid Letter Naming / 10 / 7-09 / 2:7


    Most recent STAR test scores reported to me verbally by school:
    reading: 53%
    math: 99%

    He reads for 1-2 hours a day. For fiction he mostly reads graphic novels or books like Captain Underpants. He also reads non-fiction like Horrible Science magazine.

    Last edited by Aufilia; 01/19/18 12:32 AM.
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    aeh Offline
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    His profile isn't that of the classical dyslexic, as his functional word-level reading is age-appropriate, which is likely why you are getting push back from the district. Also, in some states, a reading disability has to have below grade level reading achievement, regardless of cognitive ability. (From your post, it appears dysgraphia is not contested?)

    He does, however, have a couple of subtle weaknesses in phonological processing, which appear to form a coherent picture, and could have implications for dyslexia. Namely, his phoneme isolation and nonword repetition scores are below average. These are probably related to the achievement relative weakness on early reading skills (despite his solidly average word-level reading skills), which fall at the border of average and below average, and tend to support the idea that there is a subtle deficit in word-level decoding skills (aka, dyslexia). It likely shows up more on this subtest than on pseudoword decoding because it actually asks students for skills at the individual phoneme (speech sound) level.

    The phonological processing tasks that I named suggest to me that he may have vulnerabilities in segmenting words, which may also be contributing to his relative weaknesses in spelling (still in the average range, but far below his written expression skills absent mechanics). In other words, he had trouble breaking down the individual sounds of words. A low-level example of this would be to take the word "cat" and segment it into c-a-t. On the PI subtest referenced above, he would then need to say, for example, that the final sound was /t/. Nonword repetition is a phonological memory task, but it's also affected by the ability to distinguish/break down speech sounds, since one cannot use existing oral vocabulary to aid in the memory task.

    One of the challenges is convincing decision-makers that age/grade-appropriate achievement in reading is not ability-appropriate for very high cognitive learners.


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    Aufilia Offline OP
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    Thanks, aeh. I feel better with a second opion on the accuracy of the origianl DX and MY years-old feeling that he doesn't read like he should. I did try to make the argument in our initial meeting that it didn't matter if he was reading on grade level, his achivement is like 2-3 standard deviations below his expected ability. I don't think this new school psych has any knowledge about 2E. Everybody in the meeting was against further testing, except the principal, who told them to at least do some in-classroom testing.

    I'm really on the fence about whether I should try to protest their ruling to a higher authority OR just get some OG curriculum and do it myself, or hire a tutor. Trying to argue about it will waste possibly MONTHS of time, almost certainly the rest of this school year. Trying to do it myself or hire a tutor is expensive and time-consuming. I have a teaching degree but no actual experience in teaching early reading skills or OG curriculums. (He's been using nessy.com since November, but I have no idea if it's really solid. But it's cheap, and he enjoys it, and it's not hurting anything.)

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    aeh Offline
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    A suggestion I've made in similar cases is to work primarily on the segmentation skills. You could also, without a lot of difficulty or expense, use All About Reading/All About Spelling for scripted home-based OG instruction (my inclination would be to use AAS, as I'd be concerned that he knows too many words by sight already, so it would be more challenging to have to force him to apply phonetic decoding skills in exercises--but his spelling is on the low end of grade level, so you can attack the same phonological processing skills from the encoding side). Either way, you might find this little clip on teaching segmentation useful:

    https://blog.allaboutlearningpress.com/segmenting-spelling/

    And for AAS, 20 minutes per session, in three to five sessions per week, is not an insurmountable time investment.

    And if handwriting is an issue, you can do most of the spelling exercises using magnetic letter tiles on the whiteboard, or on the letter tile app:
    https://www.allaboutlearningpress.c...=Link%20CTA%20to%20App%20Download%20Page

    (And no, not actually a shill for All About Learning, but I have used their products with my own children, and like them as a parent and a professional!)

    Oh, and I do agree that nessy can be a good solution for many situations where in-person OG is not on the table.

    Whether you try to push this up the decision-making chain or not largely depends on what kind of services are available in the system, and how much the other costs to you and your family are. (Much like GT advocacy.) If he can get quality OG in the school (as in, please, more than 20 minutes of small group two times a week), then it might be worthwhile. Otherwise? Meh.

    I will say that, working with secondary students, I've concluded that the time to use quality remediation for (stealth or classical) dyslexia is when they are young. By the time my 2e students reach me, most of them have either amassed such a store of sight vocabulary that they don't experience significant obstacles to accessing complex text (and don't find it cost-effective to go through all the work of OG remediation, just so they can more effectively sound out some low-frequency technical vocabulary), or they've become so discouraged by word-level reading that they aren't motivated to try yet another reading remediation program. Even if you can get them to improve their reading skills, they often continue to find reading aversive. IOW, you want to remediate while he still enjoys reading.


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    Aufilia Offline OP
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    Our school does not have a reading specialist, and I'm not sure they even have an OG curriculum they use. They were hell and a half last year for a family I know whose kid legitimately reads way below grade level and really needs lot of resources ASAP--but got nothing at all in 2nd grade.

    I'll look into that program. He's been doing Nessy.com daily, plus a lesson from a Word Roots book twice a week, and occassionally when I have time a lesson from Writing with Ease.

    He did do 4 months of phonics study at the Sylvan Learning Center about 2 years ago, because his teacher was convinced he'd missed some phonics curriculum because he skipped K. Theoretically he finished all of 1st grade level phonics at that time. (I don't think so. He'd already done pre-K and K in 2 good preschools.)

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    aeh Offline
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    So the phonics work at Sylvan probably helped a bit with reading, but wouldn't have as much impact on spelling, if he truly has difficulties with segmenting sounds. (And it's a little bit of a brute force method that doesn't necessarily address the underlying phonological processing issues.) It's easier to look at letter combinations and retrieve a learned sound pattern than it is to listen to a word and generate the letter patterns, partly because there are more graphemes (letter combinations that make a single sound) than there are phonemes (speech sounds). He appears to blend adequately, which means that once he learns the phonemes that go with specific graphemes, he can combine them effectively into words. On the other hand, without strong segmentation, he can't go the other direction very efficiently, since he has to be able to tease out and sequence the individual sounds before he can start applying grapheme/phoneme rules to them.


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    Aufilia Offline OP
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    Back here reading this post again because it is, oh joy, time for his regular annual IEP update. Which is unrelated to my previous rejected request.

    They also rejected the suggestion that he has dysgraphia, and I am unsure where to even start with the dysgraphia. He has an enormously hard time writing, both the physical act and composition. At least at home he struggles with what to write. Hard to tell about what goes on at school, since I have gotten no useful information from them. His teacher was not at the early-January meeting about my re-eval request due to a family emergency.

    I'm fretting about applying to our hicap program as well. It is in the form of a 3-grade split class, so already includes a wide range of ages/abilities. They simply take the highest-scoring kids and plop them into the class, with no minimum scores that I know of, only a maxinum number of seats in the class. Last year only 35% of 3rd graders in our school were deemed "proficient" in reading according to the state tests, so I don't know where the bar is for hicap, but it's not a super exclusive program... but will probably manage to suck up DS's most likely peers.

    Last edited by Aufilia; 01/31/18 12:15 PM.

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