Thank you. Your interpretation is very valuable. Thank you for taking the time to look this information over and give me all the helpful advice.
1. Yes, GAI is 135, significantly higher than FSIQ, at a base rate of 0.9%, and well under p<.05 (difference of 8 is p<.05).
2. I can understand her wanting to chase the ASD to some extent, especially with Comprehension being notably lower than Voc and Sim, and perhaps anything she may have seen in his presentation and history that we can't see in these scores, but,
3. The extremely low Essay Composition scores, along with relative WMI and PSI weaknesses (we have discussed low WMI and PSI more extensively elsewhere), definitely warranted further eval of written expression. Did she include a TOWL-4?
No I don't see a TOWL-4. I think this is one of the things I was finding odd about the report. She didn't seem to try more tests that would pinpoint more about Written Language Expression. There is a CASL - more about Spoken Language.
The absurdly large difference between Sentence Comp and Essay Comp usually says difficulty with idea generation and organization of written expression to me. His underlying writing skills are clearly solid, as he can write a sentence at a time, however, that does not translate into the skills necessary for consistent high school-level writing. EC is an opinion essay about your personal preferences. I suspect he had difficulty pinning down a legitimate opinion about a relatively trivial topic. It is also a moderately timed task, as you are only allowed 10 minutes to both plan and execute a brief essay.
This is what I've been trying to tell everyone and it feels that this report is missing. It's what I keep trying to say OVER & OVER again and it seems like people don't want to listen. DS's gifted psyc is going to look over this report and the tests and issue her own "report". Hopefully she will be better at this. I'm glad you can see this in these numbers.
I think this is partly because it's more complicated to help a student with. It's easy to say.. well he just needs more writing instruction, and try teaching him the same thing over & over again.
I am curious as to whether subscores were listed for Sentence Comp. I find that students with difficulty with open-ended writing often do the best on Sentence Combining, slightly worse on Sentence Building, and then bomb Essay Comp.
We do have some more details, I'm not sure if these are the sub scores you are looking for the were awkwardly written in the body of the text.
Word Count SS=63;
Theme and Organization SS=71
Essay Composition SS=61 (0.5%)
"Quanlitatively, he struggled notably to decide on a topic and appropriate content for his essay. He appeared to experience significant frustration and anxiety in the process. He indicatied that he was unsure of the appropriateness of his idea's for the essay."
I seem to remember him telling me he wrote this about soccer because he couldn't think of what else to write. He is a teen who is altogether uninterested in sports and I suspect the topic was one that he found completely uninteresting.
An alternate interpretation of the discrepant Comprehension score might have to do with the less well-defined nature of that task, compared to the other two. While the evaluator was probably chasing the social comprehension aspect of it, he may actually have been struggling with the open-ended "why" nature of many of the items.
4. It also concerns me that there is a substantial difference between his oral reading accuracy when reading a list of single words, and when reading words in connected text, and attempting simultaneously to comprehend said text. Any indication that he read the word reading list any slower or faster? Or that he needed to re-read or slow down for the reading comprehension subtest? (Granted, if his miscalls are largely insignificant words, it may explain his high comprehension anyway.)
It's not in the document but I seem to remember her saying it was often small words.
5. Reading achievement is grossly in line with his VCI, as mathematics is with his PRI, but PRI is notably higher than VCI, which would be consistent with expressive language relative weaknesses, feeding into written expression weaknesses, mostly in the form of difficulty with idea generation and organization.
The main thing I would hope for your son to have in his documentation that has not previously been mentioned is some reference to these last two elements of written expression (idea generation, organization). They are particularly important when you consider the kind of higher-level literary analysis and persuasive writing that is expected in upper-division HS English classes.
Yes using graphic organizers & idea generators is in the list of recommendations, much to his chagrin.
His sporadic brilliant performance is probably closely related to his personal connection to essay topics, which enables him to generate ideas more freely, and to use context from his life experience and special interests to scaffold the organization of his writing. When it's an essay about some literary figure from an era or culture with little connection or relevance to him, he likely struggles greatly. I would suggest accommodations that include making explicit connections between writing topics and his personal experience and interests, priming the pump for idea generation with personally-relevant classroom discussion as part of his pre-writing activities, and the use of a variety of graphic organizers and concept maps to scaffold the organization of his writing.
In more than one place in the document it refers to how much better he does when he is interested in a topic. (I know this is a problem.) The WRAML2 for example, the tester read him orally two different texts. The first that he clearly wasn't interested in he got really low scores, and the second he got very high scores. Resulting in "average scores overall. This is a common theme, if he is interested in a topic he can do extremely well, but tunes out if he considers the topic boring. (Reminds me of his father.)
