Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment KTEA-3 Results

My son's tester commented he had correct answer outside of the scorable time - significant considering my son's issue is verrrrrrrry slooooooooooooow processing speed from ADHD. However, the tester was either unable or unwilling to put that statement in writing. I wrote the letter that I included.

It sounds like you have both similar pieces of information for your son. You have evidence of dysgraphia and you have a teacher who sees his true abilities. Perhaps a writing sample in which he had his accomodations in place would round out the application.

Best of luck to you. I'm curious to see how it turns out.

Yes, something may be worth investigating. Although his semantic retrieval fluency is excellent, his rapid naming skills are poor, which is the aspect of fluency that is most relevant for dyslexia and dysgraphia. And his comprehension scores are well above his decoding scores. It is possible that he may be reading largely by sight, though his phonological processing, while much weaker than his language comprehension, is not really so bad that I would be hugely concerned. He can sound out words when he needs to, and I suspect he is decoding well enough. His word recognition score is not at all weak. I think I would be more interested in the dysgraphia direction, although I would still keep an eye on the word-level decoding skills, where he is still relatively young, and the expectations for phonetic decoding are not fully formed in NT 2nd graders.

Regarding Reading Vocabulary: this subtest is not a measure of decoding skills, but of reading comprehension. This is particularly interesting, given what you've noted about his reading in context, as (estimating from his standard score) he did fine as long as there were picture cues for the meaning of the word (which also means they were more concrete vocabulary words), and he just had to identify the synonym from a list, but appears to have reached his limit when he had to identify the specific word in a sentence that was a synonym of the target word (which also meant more abstract words). This suggests to me that he derives a great deal of meaning from text by inferring the overall meaning of the sentence without knowing the exact meaning of many of the individual words. So it's not that he's decoding from context, but that he's comprehending from context. (ETA: Reading Vocabulary does actually include context for the non-picture-cued items, but you still have to know exactly what the words mean, not approximately.)
And, likely, gradually developing his vocabulary from these context clues. This is also consistent with his exceptionally strong picture-cued expressive and receptive vocabulary. He can match a word to a pictorial depiction of its meaning, but isn't quite solid on purely verbal definitions, which are a more sophisticated demonstration of vocabulary knowledge. It is possible this particular low score will sort itself out in a couple of years, as he narrows down the oral definitions of some of the words for which he currently has a less specific sense of their meaning.

I think we discussed his extremely poor articulation scores previously, and their possible impact on phonetic decoding and encoding (spelling) skills. (Though he's doing better in those areas than I would have expected, if articulation were affecting them significantly.) His motor coordination on the VMI is considerably below his perceptual skills. More evidence for a possible dysgraphic category of concern, and also consistent with an oral-motor basis for his artic weaknesses, rather than a phonological processing basis.

OT & ST make perfect sense. I would carefully monitor both of them, especially with an eye to long-term assistive technologies, as his severe artic issues may make speech-to-text less accessible (depending on how intractable they prove to be), in which case typing may well become a critical part of his future access to written expression. By this I mean that lack of reasonable progress toward functional handwriting or speech-to-text skills should trigger earlier adoption of typing as a primary mode of written communication, as persons with weaker motor coordination usually need more time to achieve fluency in typing.

So yes, I think something may be going on, but I lean toward dysgraphia, rather than dyslexia.

Thank you! It's good to hear that they took a letter you wrote yourself into consideration.

Thanks so much aeh!

Regarding his reading vocabulary/comprehension...

His teacher (who is nothing short of phenomenal), saw early this year that his reading level was well beyond their second grade class. She created a reading group for him with DD8 and the two highest readers in fourth grade. She assigns them books and meets with them once a week to discuss.

At first, she tried middle school level nonfiction books about space, etc. Then they moved up to Tales of King Arthur (I think their version had a Lexile of 900), which was also deemed "way too easy." Currently, they are reading the original 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. He's able to read and understand it as well as any of the three girls in the group.

When I showed the teacher his test scores, she was amazed that his reading vocabulary score wasn't higher. But I think that much of what you're saying is correct. He relies a lot on the context to get the general idea of what the sentence is saying.

I thought he was done with testing after the KTEA, but he said they pulled him out of class for three hours yesterday for a reading test where he had to (in his words) "read like five informative stories, one descriptive story, and only one fable, and answer boring questions about them."

I'm not sure what else they'd even be trying to evaluate as far as reading comprehension goes that wasn't thoroughly covered by the KTEA, DRA, or MAP.

I also talked briefly with the principal yesterday before I knew about this reading test, and asked if she had seen his KTEA report. She said yes, but she wanted to wait until his IEP to talk about it because they "had come up with several options they wanted to present to us." That sounds like they're still going to try to deny the full grade acceleration. Sigh....

Three hours for a reading test? He must have done something else besides reading. The longest reading test I can think of typically takes no more than an hour. Is it possible they did cognitive testing too? You should have signed a consent to test, that specified the nature of the assessments. Check to see what was on there besides academic achievement.

Make sure you request and receive all testing reports (not just scores; you should be getting narratives with a signature under them) before the meeting. For IEP meetings, you have a right to written eval reports 2 school days prior to the meeting.

I don't know. The three hours was his estimate, so it could be exaggerated. But he did say that he started, then went to recess, then went back to test, and went to lunch, and finished the test after lunch recess.

I don't have a copy of the consent form with me right now, but I seem to remember it being pretty general--just I understand the assessments might include any of the following areas, and then it listed speech/language, OT, behavioral/emotional, cognitive, achievement.

They told me at the start that they couldn't do IQ testing because there's not an in-district psychologist, and the psychologist that comes in to do testing is booked into next school year. This test was given by the speech therapist. She mentioned the CELF (I think that's what it was) at the start, and I said that I thought the other tests would be sufficient for his language evaluation, but none of that was in writing.

Does the CELF have a significant reading portion?

That helps. The CELF-5 does have optional reading and writing portions, although they typically are not given in a situation where a comprehensive achievement instrument has already been administered. The primary interest in administering both oral and written language measures is to compare receptive and expressive language in the oral and the written contexts. E.g., listening comprehension vs reading comprehension, and oral expression vs written expression. However, the lowest scorable age range is nine for reading and writing, so these would have to be for clinical information only. If she gave the entire CELF-5, with all of its optional subtests, and he needed many items to reach a natural ceiling, then three hours becomes a more realistic estimate (still a little high, but reasonable with the noted breaks). Another possibility is that she gave a different measure of reading (for the same clinical reason), such as the TORC, GORT, or GSRT. Did he have to read them out loud, or did he have the option of silent reading?

The SLP's language testing is a little more in-depth than the oral language measures from an achievement test like the KTEA-3, and can (hypothetically) be analyzed on more finely-grained clinical dimensions, which would be why additional eval in language might take place.

And most places I'd be just a bit shocked by the absence of an in-district psych, but where you live, they are constantly advertising job openings, and often have positions that consist of coverage for a region a hundred miles across. I know people who've tried conducting evals by Skype/FaceTime...

I don't know if it was silent or out loud reading. I'm going to see if I can get more information when I pick him up from school.
And yes, staffing here is a serious issue. There has been a school psychologist position listed at least since we moved here. And the superintendent cold-called me shortly after we moved in to ask if I would teach high school math (that position is still posted too).

She said it was the Morris Informal Reading Inventory, which she has to give to a certain number of kids at different reading levels because she's working on getting her literacy endorsement.
Still wish she had asked me first.