Diagnoses of LD and/or dyslexia aren't made just based upon IQ, no matter what the level of IQ is - was there other testing done to look for dyslexic symptoms?
There can be all kinds of reasons that you'd see a drop in IQ... no matter what the actual reason eventually turns up as, I would use this drop combined with the school district determination that your dd does not have an LD that was previously diagnosed as an LD by a private provider as a compelling reason to request that the district grant you an Independent Educational Evaluation - i.e., another eval usually through a private provider that the district pays for.
What's your gut feeling? Which set of scores do you feel represents your dd?
polarbear
ps - my dd7 recently went through a dyslexia screening - I suspect you have a good idea of which tests are involved based on your dd's previous testing, but if not and you would like a list, let me know, I'll be happy to post the types of screening that she was given. IQ and achievement testing were part of it, but only one piece of the overall screening.
Hi Polarbear,
Thank you for your response, you have always been very helpful and provide great information.
She was first tested by a Children's hospital and they diagnosed her with dyslexia. They did WJ of Brief Intellectual Abilities and some achievement testing. They also did GORT, TOWRE, and one other which I don't recall the name off the top of my head but had to do with reading or phonological awareness.
The school psychologist did tell me that she was distracted by noises in the hall made by children so I wonder if that had anything to do with the differences in scores.
On her Wisc results 2 years ago, with a private tester,her strongest performances were in PRI and VCI and weak in WMI, and PSI indicating a calculation of GAI instead of FSIQ. This time with the school psychologist her PRI and VCI were much lower than 2 years ago but her WMI and PSI higher than 2 years ago. And as result this time all her scores are very similar and straight across the board average and no indication for a calculation of a GAI. So they look at both FSIQs and there is only 15 points difference between the two tests. And fwiw, her WJ Brief Intellectual Ability is very close to her first WISC results done by the private tester. I hope all this is making sense.
Aside from the WISC, the school also did a speech/language eval where she is borderline low on 3 of the tests. Meaning if she had scored 1 point lower it would be a concern for those tests. And the low scores had to do primarily with short term auditory memory. Currently she is 1 year behind in reading, her biggest difficulties being fluency and accuracy. And now she is falling behind in math, which I believe is mostly due to her difficulties in directionality, transposing of numbers, and math fluency.
They have no clue as to how to stop the reversals/transposings of letters and numbers. They tell me that kids sometimes do this even into 4th and 5th grades. And when I gave the school educational specialist a paper where my daughter had written from right to left backwards, the educational specialist couldn't even tell what she was looking at. I had to point out how my daughter wrote mice as ecim, and horse as esroh, etc. My next step is to request the IEE and perhaps we can get a full neuropsych eval.
