Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Surprising observation in IEP progress report: 2e dyslexic

DS10 has been doing OG at school for a year now, where the money quote in qualification meeting was, "well, he reads at a post-high school level, but he's insecure on the alphabet."

He also has diagnoses of oral motor apraxia, oral dysphasia, disorder of written expression, social pragmatic communication disorder, and ADHD. Connors don't suggest ADHD: the diagnosis is based on observations of his behavior when asked to write. His WM and PSI are both in +2sigma range. He's medicated for ADHD at a very low level, and we've heard zero discussion of any suspected ADHD this year from the school (last year I was treated to 45 minute rants from the teacher).

In the IEP progress report for the goal: "When given a list of dictated words containing previously taught phonetic patters, {DS} will accurately encode them..." The OG teacher (who is brilliant, walks on water, and is the go to reading specialist for 2e kids) writes:
"{DS} has not yet mastered this objective. He is often able to correct his errors when asked after he writes the word. His scores for the grading period {average out to ~75%}. Interestingly when given dictated sentences, DS was able to master this objective {average out to ~98%}."

Uhhh, what? Last year, he was significantly better on spelling individual words (scoring ~60%) than words in a sentence (scoring below 20%). The teacher reports 10 separate instances for each in the 9 week quarter, so he's doing this consistently.

My son is 8 but they have mostly the same combo of diagnoses. He had his multi day evaluation with the Eides about two years ago and there were several instances of this "doing better with more not less" phenomenon in various tests.

Basically the way I understand it is that a dyslexic brain accesses and stores information in a way different than a plain brain. Part of that includes often bypassing details and looking at the whole. Like misreading the one sentence instructions but understanding the whole reading comp paragraph that follows. The instructions have no context.

Perhaps what you're seeing is a variation of this. Honestly when I stop and think about how to spell an individual word I freak myself out into a weird spelling. My son who also reads really well asked me how to spell "of" the other day. The doing better with sentences makes complete sense to me since it is what we see around here.

Great job on that 98%!

Hmm. Interesting thought. A year ago the explanation for the reverse behavior was that he can either pay attention to the spelling of the word or he can pay attention to the meaning of the sentence.

I've seen no returned work this quarter except for math (different teacher & school), so I have no basis to know what his writing looks like when he's trying to write a message with meaning.

Sadly that 98% is only part of the story. The rest of the report is about to qualify him for ESY...

Hmmm... interesting. I'm doing All About Spelling with DD9 (dyslexic, ADHD-I) and see your original pattern: she remembers the gory details of the rules (in so far as they exist - argh!) much better with individual words, and tends to lose them with sentences. I wonder, though - could it be an ADHD effect kicking in? Does your wonderful OG teacher maybe provide such interesting sentences that they are easier to keep attention focused on? DD's psych testing showed a pattern of much higher scores on "meaningful" memory and processing tasks as opposed to those without content, and we definitely see that in real life, too.

Was his pattern a year ago with dictated sentences, or original sentences? What kind of spelling errors is he making in isolated spelling? Are they dysphonetic? Phonetic equivalents? Homophone errors? Given that he is able to correct his spelling errors when cued, is he using the context of the sentence to cue self-corrections? Does he repeat both the dictated words and sentences out loud before writing them? Either? Neither?

The report says that this is dictated sentences.
I have none of this information in the report. You have now just outlined my questions for Tuesday's IEP meeting. Thanks for this

What's the path forward if the misspellings are dysphonetic? I see a lot of this in his writing that he does at home and if I were to guess, this is what he's doing.

Yes, we saw the same with AAS dictated sentences as was observed in the original testing.

We see no signs of "meaningful" vs not memory, though we see a huge difference in writing ability when it's something he finds interesting vs not wrt content, structure, complexity, as well as spelling accuracy.

Always happy to have been of service!
I'm going to speculate that he is not consistently using spelling strategies (which include segmenting down to the phoneme level, selecting appropriate graphemes according to learned rules, and sequencing them to encode the complete word). When cued, he remembers that they exist, and has the cognition to apply them accurately. Otherwise, he may be reverting to old, ineffective strategies for recalling spellings by shape or by guess. This, of course, tells us that he has not automatized the process of spelling, although he can consciously articulate the principles. It appears that he continues to need cueing to apply strategies, on a regular basis. He also needs a wider array of unknown (much higher-level, or nonsense) words on which to practice spelling strategies and phonetic encoding skills, to "force" him to use them.

Now why he does so much better on sentences...I think we don't have enough information on that, but that would be a good question to ask his teacher. What is he (or she) doing differently when dictating sentences? What about the process is cuing him more effectively? I notice that his single word spelling accuracy has grown a little bit over the year (60 to 75%), which is within the range of expectations for working on an isolated skill, but, as you point out, his accuracy for dictated sentences has grown substantially. I believe we had a discussion about a history that appears to include a remediated expressive language disability. It may be that his ongoing growth in expressive language abilities is also manifesting in his ability to take more context-rich dictation. Oral and written sentence repetition (which is what dictation is, of course) also rely on working memory (excellent, in his case) and fluent grasp of grammar and syntax. Perhaps growth in oral expressive language is feeding into sentence dictation.

I asked previously about whether he is repeating words/sentences out loud before writing them, in particular because speaking the words himself may be helping to cue him to segment the sounds, translate them to graphemes, and sequence the graphemes on paper. Sentences are long enough that he may be more inclined to rehearse them to himself, just to help remember the whole sentence. Whereas he may go straight from hearing an individual word to writing it, which skips the oral repetition that may be cueing him to apply spelling strategies.

On meaningful/non meaningful memory: some individuals have much better access, or retrieval efficiency, when meaning is involved, or skills are contextualized. The performance difference you report in the context of high/low interest is essentially the same thing. This is not, by the way, necessarily correlated with working memory per se; someone with exceptionally high working memory could still have a differential between contextualized and decontextualized retrieval.

Thanks for this. I think there's also an aspect of respecting the person asking as well.

This feels very much true. Thanks for articulating it.

If this is the case, what is the path forward? He gets OG 2x/week, Thursday and Friday. My gut is that this is insufficient and the 5 days between OG is going to limit progress. Is this a sign of that?

Where does such a list come from? I know DD complained/joked/mocked the repetition of the nonsense words when she went through this (but her OG was 5x/week). Is this something I can expect the teacher to produce?

A point of detail is that the 60% was what he was doing upon starting OG a year ago. His first quarter reporting showed 75% on this goal, and he's remained there. Each time I've asked to this point, the response has been that since the taught phonological skills has increased and he's being tested on a larger set of phonological skills, this is still a signal of making progress.

One thought is that since I can't tell what constitutes improvement, this goal needs to be rewritten.

Yes, but upon reflection, I feel pretty strongly (but with no data) that this was a consequence of the oral motor apraxia: he was reducing down each statement to the bare minimum. That being said, I'm not sure how this adaptation affects ones development. He now hits the ceiling on all aspects of CELF (but average on parts of CELF-Meta and Bombs part of the SLDT, but bombs a different part each time)

When doing AAS I have to prompt him to repeat the sentence, which greatly increases his ability to remember the sentence, with no (qualitative) sense that it improves his spelling.

I think that asking about the oral repetition of the single word vs dictated sentence is a key question. Thanks. I'll ask it ahead of the IEP meeting.

I would agree that 2x/wk is insufficient OG, especially where the two days are consecutive. Ideally, OG should be 5x30 per week, or even 5x60 per week (though sometimes kids get burned out on the longer sessions). There is research that suggests 2x30 can be effective, but that is probably more applicable to mild/moderate dyslexia. If 5x60 is not an option, I would prioritize more frequent sessions over lengthier ones.

Yes, the teacher should have some level of access to lists of nonsense words. Here's a link to a program that generates them in a variety of languages, including English:
http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/wuggy
It's also on this page that lists a number of pseudo word resources:
http://www.lcampanelli.org/nonword_databases/

On the goal/objective: consider specifying which phonological skills he should be mastering, instead of the percentage of accuracy. E.g., "will demonstrate mastery of the three most common spellings of long a in 3 out of 4 opportunities", "will correctly spell consonant-le patterns at 90% accuracy". The OG teacher can also include a number of specific patterns (whatever she thinks is achievable in the next year). They don't have to be comprehensive of what she will work on with him, just indicators of his progress.

Sounds like he is still struggling with language pragmatics, but not pure language. You may be correct that his history of language development delays was more a function of oral-motor skills than of cognitive language. I wonder if his variable performance on social language reflects the same kind of inconsistency of application that appears to be in play for spelling--which again suggests that his success in the area relies on conscious cognitive processes, rather than automatized ones.

Can you share with me citations on the frequency data, including the 2x30 for mild/moderate? (Frequency as a search term is leading things astray. I've found just one paper on this topic from 1983.)

I'm not even sure how to classify the severity here. We've got a 10+ grade level gap between reading and spelling level here, but that says as much about the reading level being massively above grade level as it does about the spelling being below. I think that each member of DS' team views the severity of his case very differently.

Just got this year's speech scores: all pragmatics test in the average to above average range, with the lowest scores increasing 30+ points.

One reference point: The recommendations for Wilson, which is an OG intervention:

http://www.wilsonlanguage.com/programs/wilson-reading-system/

Note that small group intervention is recommended as 5x45-90, while individual tutoring ranges from 2-5x60-90 minutes.

Page 5 of this document summarizes recommended frequency of intervention sessions for a number of variants:

https://www.winsorlearning.com/imag...ix-of-Multisensory-Language-Programs.pdf

I saw the 2x30 in a poster presentation about two years ago, so that research may not have been published yet, as it was probably part of someone's dissertation work.