Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional PSI score up 21 points (and other eval results)

I finally got DD's eval report from the school district (I put in a written request in early October--geez).

I asked the school psych to give her the processing speed section of the WISC IV again. DD had taken the full test 13 months earlier and the private psych said she had "slow processing speed" because her GAI was 150 and processing speed was 94. Her coding score in particular (in 2013) was below average (an 8). So now her processing speed score is 115. I don't have the breakdown between coding and symbol search but sent an email asking about this.

She was also given the WIAT and WJ written expression clusters.

I can't find the score for alphabet writing fluency so i emailed about that as well.
Otherwise
WIAT
spelling: 113
sentence combining 135
sentence building 108
---sentence composition 126
essay composition-word count 106
theme development and organization 114
---essay composition 110

She said she wrote an essay that was 2-3 sentences (she was timed for 10 min.), so I find these scores extremely difficult to believe. I wonder if the scoring is very subjective and her scores are inflated.

For the WJ-writing she was at 116 for writing samples and 100 for sentence writing fluency, giving her a written expression composite of 110. It says on the report that her score needs to be 110 or below to qualify as SLD, given her GAI of 150, and I have no idea how they would come up with 110 as 1.75 standard deviations below 150. But whatever--it sounds like she might qualify for services under the SLD category.

In terms of executive functioning and how she is functioning in the classroom she was very impaired in terms of everything so I think she should at least qualify for services in terms of ADHD (but who knows!).

We don't meet until next week.

I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the large gaps between scores for writing and if we can rule out dysgraphia. She was given the BOT-2 and Beery VMI as well. For the BOT 2 she was at 90th percentile for fine manual control and 79th percentile for Manual Coordination.

For the Beery VMI:
visual: 65th percentile
motor: 94th percentile
visual motor integration: 79th percentile

If you don't get the info from someone here, I'd be sure to ask the school psych who administered the test to explain how each subset of the WIAT written subtests is administered (prompt, what your dd had to do, and how her answers were recorded, as well as - was the subtest timed). Without that info it's difficult to know if her scores are that low because her skills are that low (relatively), or if whatever is driving the dip in processing speed is impacting the written expression scores. You'll want to discuss written work that's completed for her school assignments.


So are they giving her an IEP under SLD/written expression? Is the upcoming meeting a meeting to draft the IEP, or is it a meeting to determine eligibility?


If you think the team might not qualify her, I'd recommend putting together a list of every example you can think of re how she's impacted in the classroom and when doing homework at home etc due to her EF functioning, and take the list with you to the meeting. If the school staff says testing doesn't show an EF deficit, cite the classroom/etc examples that show how she's impacted re her academics.


How long ago did the school finish your dd's testing? Was it longer than your district's required time maximum between testing and meeting? Longer than your state's required time between testing and meeting?


I really can't help with the actual scores, but there does appear to be a significant difference between visual and motor components of the Beery. I took a quick peak at my dysgraphic ds' Beery scores - his issue is fine motor, not visual, and his visual component was not hugely higher than your dd's, and his fine motor was a lot lower. Not that that means anything at all!

I'm glad you finally got the test report - I hope you'll be able to get the subtest scores, and I hope your meeting goes well.

Best wishes,

polarbear

polarbear,
Thanks for your input. Do you know what they actually have to do on the Beery VMI? The OT wrote this: The VMI is designed to measure visual-motor (i.e. eye-hand) coordination skills of children ages 2-18 by presenting a sequence of 24 geometric forms to be copied with paper and pencil. The Visual Test presents shapes that are smaller and closer together, making it more demanding for both visual acuity and visual perception, while the Motor Test measures the ability to control the finger and hand movements." So I guess I'm confused as to what DD was actually doing on the Visual portion of the test.

Last year at this time she wasn't copying sentences from the board into her planner and she was writing over and over letters in a sort of compulsive way. I think she was writing over errors. When she was given spelling tests, she left some words blank saying she couldn't keep up with the teacher saying the words. That, combined with the poor processing speed on the WISC IV prompted me to take her to a private therapy center and she did the BOT 2 (for motor skills), with some below average results, esp. on the sections that were timed. She was at the 24th and 30-something percentiles and now they are 90th and 79th. I find that improvement to be a little unbelievable (although she started taking piano so maybe that did the trick? Who knows).

The report states that she did Alphabet Writing Fluency on the WIAT but the scores are not in the chart with the other WIAT scores. It states that for this test she wrote 23 letters in 30 seconds and had two errors, including writing a Z backwards which she corrected and one other error which she wrote over. The report says kids her age are expected to correctly write 25 letters. She is 9 in fourth grade. I don't understand why she would make an error like writing a Z backwards.

I also asked the OT if she could test DD for copying speed, and she agreed, but what she did was send DD into a third grade classroom (since they insisted she needs to be compared to "age-peers", not grade peers--never mind the fact that she is older than most kids in third grade) for a few minutes and all 28 of the kids did the copying. That test showed DD to actually be advanced, copying 33 letters per minute and the class was at 27. I can hardly find anything online about copying speed but one chart that I did find said third graders should be copying 45-50 letters per minute so I think that all that test shows is that the kids in the school (outside of the gifted program which starts in 4th grade) are impaired in terms of writing, probably because the school is so hyperfocused on math and reading test scores that they are neglecting it. I wish I could find norms on this. Maybe I'll call DD's old OT and see if she has anything.


They sent home the checklists for eligibility under the Other Health Disorders category (ADHD) and SLD (for written expression) except they are blank except for the statement asserting that she has to score 110 or below to determine eligibility for SLD because her GAI was 150. Then in the blank next to "standardized test scores" she had filled in 117/WIAT, 110/WJ" Other than that there is nothing in here about what they think should be done with DD or any clues as to whether she qualifies for an IEP. It is just observation/test results. They gave me and two teachers the BRIEF for executive functioning (at first they weren't even going to do that!), and the teachers rated her as severely impaired, almost to a comical point where you know they had to be inflating the results because they are so negative. Anything over a 65 is clincially significant and I had rated her as 75 for "Global Executive Composite", one teacher scored 86, and the other one was at a 105. The mean is supposed to be 50 with a standard deviation of 10. I have a feeling the teachers are trying VERY HARD to get her qualified under the OHD category, and they know that the other people on the team (like the psych and special ed teacher) have been fighting us and didn't want to evaluate her in the first place. To qualify for SLD they have to "demonstrate a severe discrepancy of more than 1.75 standard deviations below the mean of the distribution of tdifference score for general population, based on age, between general intelluctual ability". There are other criteria that need to be met as well, for instance the student has to have a disorder in one or more basic psychological processes which includes an information processing condition that is manifested in a variety of settings by behaviors such as:
organization; planning and sequencing; working memory (verbal, visual, or spatial); visual or auditory processing; speed of processing; motor control for written tasks, etc (there are other things listed as well). Considering that they hardly did any testing, I'm not sure how they are going to check things off on that section. "Speed of Processing" is now apparently normal so they are going to have to mark her impaired in other areas to qualify her under that category.

One observation showed her to be on-task 52 percent of the time, and the other 85 percent. Supposedly she was facing the wall on the second observation so I have a feeling they are going to use that to suggest she does fine just with a different desk placement, when really she probably needs a para and to be removed from the room for certain assignments/tests (the room is very loud/noisy basically all the time). I'm not sure what is reasonable to ask for in this case.

They say that the deadline for testing her was yesterday and they are fine on that, but that is only because they didn't give me a decent eval proposal to sign until a month after I put in a request. At first they refused to test her for math fluency and I had to argue about other things, like the fact that they weren't even going to give us the BRIEF. The proposal they first had was comical with about 3 tests (or sub-sections of tests) and I couldn't sign it. They were just going to do the WJ writing cluster, the Beery VMI, and the BOT2 as well as a couple observations. That's basically it.

Other than the BRIEF and teacher checklists, there is nothing in this eval to indicate that they think DD needs anything. They go on about how her standardized test scores are great, her grades this year and previous years are great (although I think the grades are very misleading--she is getting an "A" in writing even though she can't generate a paragraph that makes sense!). There is nothing in the report stating that there are large gaps in scores between ability and achievement. Her math fluency score was 102 which indicates to me a problem because she is operating at the level of a 9 year old for fluency, but is working out of a 7th-8th grade level textbook. That's going to cause her to be slow and stressed out. I think it's something they should keep an eye on, but all it says is that she is performing what is expected of her age in terms of math fluency (remember they fought me in terms of testing that).

Students are presented with a green booklet (yes, the paper is eye-ease green), in the landscape orientation, with a large-square 2x3 grid. In the upper row of the matrix are three geometric forms. In the lower row, the boxes are empty. The student uses a pencil with an eraser to copy each form in the empty box below it. Forms are graded by difficulty level.
For the Visual Perception test, students are presented with pages with six or more sets of vertically-arrayed geometric forms. The top form is the target form. Beneath it are two or more similar versions of the form, of which one is an exact match. The student selects the form that is identical to the target form.
I sent you some other info by pm.
Expanding on that, improvements in sustained attention and motor coordination are not unreasonable with piano practice, and have some likelihood of transferring to other fine-motor-speed tasks. The Motor Coordination test of the VMI is timed. The remainder is not.
I would guess this was an attentional thing, based on the other data. It's unclear from the description, but it sounds like she wrote all the letters, but did not receive credit for the overwritten letter or the z. (You can only get credit for a maximum of 25 letters because the first letter is done for you.)
Yes. They are slow. Article on handwriting speed by the author of the PAL-2:

http://www.schools.utah.gov/CURR/langartelem/Actions-and-Programs/Handwriting/HandwritingSpeed.aspx
Looks like she just barely qualifies under the discrepancy model on the WJ testing, which does include the two fluency measures.According to their own document, her math and writing fluency are discrepant from her ability...

Thanks aeh, I sent you a PM. For the alphabet writing fluency test it says she made two errors. The Z and one other letter that she wrote over, so she correctly wrote 23 letters. Do you think it's normal for a 4th grader to even make an error like writing a z backwards? She fixed it but that's probably because it looked obviously wrong. She seems too old for that.

I guess I'm confused about why the report says nothing about the discrepancy between her cognitive ability and her performance on most of the tests (as well as gaps between subtests, like fluency usually being lower). According to the State best practices for evaluations, they are supposed to be looking at patterns of strengths and weaknesses but I just don't see anything in here about that, leading me to believe they are going to say "she is performing at the right level, you are crazy for worrying about any of this, and we don't need to do anything." Although she did state that there is a discrepancy on the actual eligibility checklist where she had to fill in the scores.

That's an awesome study for copying speed! Thanks! That's what I was looking for. I can take that in and say that I think their results are fascinating because the kids are so impaired. Perhaps half the class should be evaluated?

At least she stated there was a discrepancy on the eligibility checklist. That's one positive.

I'll check your pm.