Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional dyslexia diagnosis??

Hi all -
We got testing results back for my DD8 today. The psychologist diagnoses:

--Reading disorder - because IQ is 140, verbal IQ is 138 (both WISC), but WJ-3 Broad Reading is 107, 33 points below.

--Disorder of written expression - again, WISC IA is 140, verbal IQ of 138, but broad written score is 101 - 39 points lower.

--LD not otherwise specified - on the math, her Broad Math was 133, with calculation at 137 (99 percentile) applied problems at 127 (96 percentile) but fluency at 101 (52nd percentile) - 31 points below.

I am wondering how the school is likely to react. Does anyone know if this a common way to diagnose a learning disorder, by looking at the gaps? Or will this be an unfamiliar approach to them?

Also wondering - does this mean she has dyslexia? Or can she have disorders of writing/reading that is not dyslexia?

Also wondering - what the heck are we going to do now? :-) We like our public school, but I just don't know what sort of resources they might have for our girl. But that's probably not one for this board, eh? :-)

Thank you!

Hi, JamD--

Kudos to you for getting some answers; sorry that they will bring new puzzles to figure out, but at least you know what's up now.

I would investigate all options with the public school, as well as looking about for other options. Oftentimes for a kid with disabilities the public school is the place to be-- because in a public school children have civil rights (to a Free Appropriate Public Education, or FAPE, Appropriate meaning individualized if demonstrably necessary). Whereas in a private school, if a person turn out to be hard to educate in any way, they can kick him/her out or otherwise not meet the needs with no legal recourse available.

The book From Emotions to Advocacy and the Wrightslaw website were very helpful to us in the early stages of figuring out.

DeeDee

Yes, this is a common way to diagnose a learning disability, but it's common for schools to reject it because the performance is still average. It will likely depend on the local standards and how helpful the school is towards kids with disabilities. My daughter was recently put on an IEP with similar scores (lowest 101; 2-3 standard deviation differences from IQ index) for reading and writing disorders. We are the "beneficiaries," however, of the fact that the district is now under state oversight for past mis-deeds regarding children with dyslexia. My daughter's holes are not as broad as yours, however, so this may also make getting help at school easier.


The DSM-IV describes Reading disorder and Disorder of Written Expression only. Generally, yes, these align with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Are these your only test results? Did your DD take a test looking at her phonological awareness and processing? Tests are DIBELS, AIMS Web, CTOPP. These can help pinpoint the source of the discrepancy in dyslexia. For the dysgraphia, fine motor testing seems to be crucial. My daughter appears to have dysgraphia, but it looks *very* different than descriptions I find on this forum and online. This is part of what delayed our getting testing done. The reading disorder came as a surprise.


First: Take a deep breath.
Second: Get back on the phone with the psychologist, and ask: Is this dyslexia/dysgraphia, and what type? Ask about the phonological processing. Ask for recommendations for remediation -- specifically Orton-Gillingham or Wilson, or something else.

After the first sessions in which they were doing DD's IQ test and then starting on several of DD's areas of strength in achievement testing, the psychologist kept telling me to transfer her to the Local Fancy Private $chool. She'll find peers there. She needs more challenge.

Then he saw DD's phonological scores, writing samples, spelling, and other areas she bombed. The discussion of LFP$ disappeared. They couldn't provide DD with the services or accommodations she needs.

Third: Find help. Hopefully the school will jump up to help her. However, even though we presented the report to the school Feb 8, the IEP took until May 21, giving DD just 10 days of services before the end of the year.

Now, here's my caution: We had a few false starts on finding help. The first OG tutor ($60/45 minutes) had a smaller and less flexible vocabulary than DD. This exacerbated a personality mismath. We ended up at the university's tutoring center, which had its other issues, but was run by a woman entranced by DD's test scores. One of the tutors assigned to us needed a lot of coaching from me on how to work with DD (no easy task). My caution here is to try something and if it doesn't work, reevaluate, cut losses, and move on.

DS14 has a very similar profile to JAMD's daughter. He was first diagnosed with a learning disability by a private psychologist due to the big gap between his ability and his achievement in grade 1. The school board accepted the psychologist's report, and he started getting some extra help with reading. I didn't see much improvement with the school program, so he did private tutoring in phonics for 18 months when he was 6 and 7. It really improved his reading skills. He now has great comprehension although he still tends to miss some of the small words when reading out loud. Spelling is still a big problem. The term Dyslexia is not officially used in Ontario, but fits him well.

He received a grant to obtain a computer for classroom use in grade 5. He now types all his essays. Spellcheck fixes almost all his spelling problems, although it misses things like latter for later. Learning the times tables and how to tell time were also an issue, but in grade 9, he gets to use a calculator and now he is considered to be good in math.

There are programs like Read and Write Gold or WordQ that can read the text to your daughter on the computer. You can scribe for your daughter for essays until she gets better at typing. This would allow her to show how much she knows and removes the bottleneck of getting it on paper.

The public school system worked for my son. He is now enrolled in a high school gifted program, and gets time and a half for exams and the use of a computer for exams with lots of writing. He was blessed with executive functioning issues as well as dyslexia and that is the biggest challenge right now.

One more thought -- have you covered the very basics? Has her vision been checked? Does she complain about headaches when reading? You need someone who can not only check vision, but also how her eyes work together when reading lines of text.

our dd had a 60 point spread with some of her testing. ceiling on some subtests and well below 100 on others.
You likely wont qualify for an IEP with achievment in the average range.
we had some scores at 80 so that qualified for some things. but mostly we went with a 504 and heavy accomidations with goals to encourage eventual compensation.
Check into Barton. its a OG program that you can do at home. if you pass the phonemic awareness testing yourself, that is. dyslexia and auditory processing problems tend to run in families.

its tedious for both the student and the teacher, but it works and it will help develop letter-sound sense and more fluent reading. for us it even helped with spelling some. she did not even know how to divide words into separate sounds or put words into syllables. we didnt know these deficits until we did the barton.

also check into stealth dyslexia as described by the Eides. that was a spot on description of us.

ot may help with writing mechanics. but you may not qualify with the school. if you can afford it or insurance covers it, it might be more efficient to do out of school. also Scottish rites hospitals have programs for dyslexia if you have one near you.

Thank you all for your comments/input! Yes, we've had her vision checked, but not with a developmental opthamologist. However, I've asked if she gets headaches, or feels like the letters move, etc, and she denies all of that.

I just found this tidbit from the state website: "When determining whether your child has a specific learning disability, the [IEP] group...Is not required to take into consideration whether there is a severe difference between your child’s intelligence and achievement in speaking thoughts, writing thoughts, reading, understanding what is heard and read and solving mathematical problems."

That doesn’t seem good...

The WrightsLaw website was very interesting - glad to know there are some resources out there! This feels a bit overwhelming.

We had some more specific reading tests done, which I think I posted before:
Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test-3: 61st percentile
Rapid Digit Naming - 63rd percentile
Rapid Letter Naming - 75th percentile
Woodcock Reading Mastery Test Word ID - 59th percentile
Woodcock Reading Mastery Test Word Attack 74th percentile

Gray Oral Reading Test - Fluency 63rd percentile
Rate 75th percentile
Accuracy 63rd percentile
Wide Range Achievement Test-3 Spelling - 42nd percentile

Gray Oral Reading Test Comprehension 98th percentile
Diagnostic Achievement Battery-2 Story Comprehension - 95th percentile
Expressive Vocab 93rd percentile
Detroit Tests of Learning Oral Directions 99th percentile
Diagnostic Achievement Battery 2 Math Calculation 95th percentile


Interestingly, DH has always been an incredibly slow and labored reader, has some of the characteristics on the dyslexia checklist.

I am just curious if I will be swimming upstream when I talk to the school psychologist. Is she going to see these scores as a potential problem? I guess I'll find out on Friday.....

Thank you!

There's no great holes there consistent with the lower broad reading and writing scores. Do you have WISC processing speed scores? It could be thaf the fluency stems from there.

Don't write off the schools for the IEP just yet. Our state has the same language on what's required-- that stems from a revision in the federal law in 2004. DD is on an IEP. I readily admit that this is largely a consequence of the school dealing with past misdeeds, but I am seeing more and more reports of people with profiles like you posted (and my daughter's very similar one), end up with services at school.

Blech.

We met with the school psychologist yesterday. It was discouraging. This was an informal initial conversation, so nothing is set in stone - but while she was very nice, my underlying feel of her take-home message was that really, there's no problem here - DD will be fine. She was clear that DD would not qualify for an IEP, but said 504 might be possible.

She also seemed to think it unlikely that DD could qualify either for reading intervention, or the gifted program - reading is close to grade level, and even though IQ and math are both 99 percentile, reading is only 78 or so (because comprehension is high and mechanics is low) and they are strict with their "at least 95th percentile in all three" rule for gifted. Again, still open for discussing, but not an encouraging conversation.

Her feeling for the most likely and appropriate avenue is differentiation in the 3rd grade classroom. But in a room of 26-28 kids, I'm not convinced that would be very effective.

Now....there is actually a school in our city that specifically is for kids with learning disabilities. My friend's sister is the admissions director, and I've talked to her. She looked at the reports, and said all sorts of beautiful things - that they have all these resources in place for reading/writing disorders; that DD could get that help, and also get accelerated to 4th or 5th grade in math - still with accommodations for the reading and processing. The school's goal is to have kids for just a couple of years, teach skills and strategies around the disorder, then transition them back into public schools. Doesn't that sound incredibly awesome?

But the price tag - $20,000 per year. Really.

I feel so torn. On the one hand, I think maybe we CAN work with (wrangle with/ struggle with) the public school and make things work out ok for her. Maybe they WILL come around with help - but we won't know until school starts, really.

On the other hand, I think of my DH. He is one of the most creative, smartest people I know. But he has spent his entire life feeling like the "dumb kid," not able to get high grades in school, struggling with getting thoughts onto paper, struggling to pull meaning from the written word. I can see how hard that has been for him - and honestly believe he probably has a profile like DD. Maybe it's worth it, to prevent that from happening again?

Or maybe that's overkill, and we can make something work without the big price tag.

I wish I could look into the future. :-)

geofizz, her WISC processing scores were lower than the others, though not too bad:

verbal comprehension - 138
perceptual reasoning - 129
working memory - 126
processing speed - 115

Thanks!

JamD, I first looked at your other post with the WISC and WJ-III Broad scores - do you have the individual subtest scores from the WJ-III (or was it WIAT?) achievement tests? It's possible that the lower scores on the "Broad" tests are due to lower scores on any test labelled "fluency" - there is usually one given in each category (reading, writing, math) and the fluency tests are designed to check for speed and accuracy, handwriting is required on the response and the subtest is timed - so if handwriting *speed* is impacted by the Disorder of Written Expression, a student's test scores on the fluency tests will be low relative to their ability to perform the calculation/etc.

I have a ton of suggestions re "what to do next" - but no time to post at the moment. I'll be back later this weekend. In the meantime, can you post a bit about the specifics the psych saw re reading and writing challenges? Did the psych suggest a specific reading curriculum? Are the writing challenges in the physical act of handwriting or are there challenges with written expression (or both?)

Last piece of quick advice - hang in there!

More later,

polarbear