Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment reading test scores - not sure what to do.

I'm piping in to second the "stealth dyslexia" idea. My DD had rapid digit/letter naming in the 16th percentile but still reads above level...though in K she was reading at grade 3 and now she's finishing grade 3 reading at grade 5.

It's more or less a coincidence that this has been coming out from a university study she was in over a period of three years. You can see the scores going down, but she's still fine. They can get super high comprehension scores, in my understanding, from all the words they've learned to memorize and from context clues (these are really smart kids!)

We gave the school the university scores and they said they couldn't comment on them. For the rapid naming and any areas that had to do with "nonsense" the school said DD probably just refused to do them because she wouldn't have liked "nonsense". The university folks said "no way".

Now that she's working with more difficult words that you have to break down/sound out (this week were "dis" words like discouraging, discontinuing) you can really see the lack of skills. But since they've never done phonics (I used to do it with her when I homeschooled her but have been leaving her alone the past two years because the words have still been all ones she already knows) it's hard to know if that's part of the problem.

Her teacher DOES NOT say the spelling words when they are given to her group, the teacher writes them on a white board and they copy them down. The teacher doesn't say them, put them in a sentence, or break them down. We get some very, very interesting interpretations of words/spelling if DD can't quite copy them down quickly enough. The teacher gives her a "star" after supposedly reviewing them. I would think that step is the time to realize the fact that DD didn't get it, and to work with her. They just let her do this, and if i don't work with her at home, she just gets it wrong on the test.

Once word this week does not exist and I did a little playground survey of other moms to ask them what they thought. Between the odd spelling and her handwriting there was mostly head-shaking. Notes and conversations about this with the teacher have been going back and forth for a couple of months. We're going to seek outside advocacy after testing is complete, since she'll have this teacher next year for a loop.

Then at home there is hair-pulling, crying, and arguing, then we use the dictionary, and finally we get them all pounded out. She practices them with breaking it down, spelling, sounding, etc., and some drama (she likes to have the letters, words and their meanings discussed and maybe dramatized...I guess that's her multi-sensory idea) then she gets 100% on the spelling test.

So I guess the point of this very long post is to support the idea that they can have those markers for dyslexia, have learned to read, and can get so far with their compensation skills. It just takes longer for the whole thing to catch up with them.