Hello, it's been a long time between posts...

My 16yr old has a long history of testing for all sorts of things (she's somewhere between MG-HG, Aspie, dyslexic, APD, hypermobile joints, etc). She's currently not had any tests of any kind for about 3.5 years and has been doing well at school, not without issues, but mostly showing more of her gifts than her weaknesses. However, she needs to be able to type her long answer written exams (English and History) for year 11/12 IB and so we are no required to jump through all the hoops again.

She has (fairly) neat handwriting and can produce large volumes of handwriting at a decent speed (with increasing pain for length of time). Her issue is that her writing quality degrades, she loses over all quality of expression, sentence structure, punctuation, output becomes too long, etc. She feels like she can't "think".

We've been asked for a "Full Educational Assessment" ie IQ and academic testing, but it's not really clear to me what aspect of a standard set of IQ/matched academic tests is going to identify and address this issue. Does anyone have any insight?

The profiles that I usually consider for typed response as an accommodation include:

oral expression > written expression
any reasoning index (VCI, PRI, VSI, FRI) > processing speed (PSI, or just the Coding subtest)
verbal cognition (VCI) > written verbal achievement (written expression, writing fluency/output, written mechanics)
quality of written expression (i.e., composition skills not scored for mechanics) > written mechanics
brief written expression (sentence length) > extended written expression (essay/paragraph length)

Psychoed assessment is involved most likely because they are attempting to document educational impact to justify the specialized accommodation of typed response. (Though one would hope that sometime in the very near future typing for long essays would become a standard accommodation for any student!)

Of course, any below average result from OT/fine motor assessment, or, presumably, a doctor's note stating that her joint hypermobility is a medical condition affecting prolonged writing tasks, ought to support typed response. She's reporting pain while writing extended pieces, which, one would hope, would be a shoo-in for typed response.

AEH, thank you so much! That is really very helpful. I have been through so many rounds of IQ tests with my kids, but the matched educational testing seems less commonly applied here so I am not really clear what is in those tests and how the parts match up etc.

I was particularly unclear how we could be ascertaining the benefit of typing without directly testing the typing...

It's odd that no one has mentioned a paediatrician assessment of her joint hypermobility, I will look into that too.