Present Levels of Performance

I am a special ed. teacher and I agree with you. I intend to ask for yearly WJ testing on my own child as long as she has an IEP. This is not an unreasonable request. It may not be standard procedure, but it is reasonable.

Janis

This is the Test of Written Language (TOWL). The Writing fluency part of the WJ-III is putting nouns and verbs together and making sentences and my daugher does very well on it (probably due to years of speech therapy and combining verbs plus objects and adjectives…. She has difficulties with reading and writing as she is hearing impaired.

The TOWL on the other hand is much more detailed. She is given a visual picture as a writing prompt and she has to create her own narrative from it. In addition there are other subtests of the TOWL that can be given to access her writing abilities.

Hi Jody,

Asking for some standardized testing is absolutely appropriate on an annual IEP. It used to automatically be done EVERY year, but somehow this got changed and now standardized testing is only done if it is SPECIFIED on the previous IEP as a way to evaluate progress. I think this was because, for some goals, standardized testing is not appropriate, but now it has become the rule. Most schools take advantage of this and are careful only to specify evaluation methods like “observation” “informal” and “teacher-made tests” which can mean just about anything. My suggestion to you is to look at last year’s IEP and see if the method of evaluation mentions standardized testing, and if it does not, put your request in writing at least a month before the IEP meeting, to give them time to comply. It’s my understanding that if you make a specific request for it, they must comply!

Patti’s suggestion to do the TOWL is a good one, as it has some helpful subtests, but I agree you should also have the same test done as before, so you are comparing Apples to Apples and can see what her progress (or lack thereof) consists of — it’s my contention that the reason schools don’t like to do this kind of testing is because they don’t want parents to KNOW how badly their kids are doing!

By the way, I am a resource teacher and I do pre- mid- and post-testing every year on my students, in addition to testing them before their annual IEP’s. It’s more work for me, but I consider it part of my job to know where they are at. I even put standardized testing in the IEP when I send them on to middle school, though I’m sure the middle school teachers must hate me for it! I do it because I know that’s what I’d want my kid to have, if it was his IEP. And guess what, my students ARE making progress and I’m proud of it!

Sharon
www.angelfire.com/on2/thepuzzle

Thank you all. This web site is a God send for us parents! I know that the school bureaucracy often gets in the way of good teaching, but here is one mom who really appreciates all you do. Thanks again!

Hi Jody,
The schools don’t have to do formal retesting every year. The reason is because of the cost and time spent on testing. Special
Education was not meant to be what it has turned in to. It was for the mainly for those children with severe disabilities not for those that are ‘disabled’ due to lack of or poor teaching. The use of ‘whole language’ principles has not only affected the amount of children that can’t read on grade level but also in creative writing. The philosophy has included teaching grammar only through a student’s writing, not taught in isolation or through diagraming, so that you don’t stifle their creativity. This also includes teaching paragraph structure and spelling. This year I teach eleventh grade and I had to start with teaching the parts of speech and subject verb agreement. This was not only in my self-contained English class but also my class that I teach with an English teacher. My school district had a teacher work day that involved all the teachers , elementary, middle school, and high school, discuss major educational problems. The topic initiated by the teachers was grammar and creative writing. We were talking about the terrible writing by most students including the gifted and talented. One of my many comments was, If you don’t teach spelling,(no program) and writing structure, how can a student be ‘disabled’ in both of those areas? Next to reading, creative writing is a very overused justification of services for special ed. Generally this is due to poor teaching methods. If you don’t teach it, how can it be justification for special education services? The only way that you can remediate it is to use a highly structured, multi-sensory writing program, a vocabulary unit that includes word roots, and grammar program. I personally don’t feel that written expression should be a category for special ed services because, as I stated above, we haven’t been teaching the ‘how of it’ for the past 15 years. Most of the school districts are teaching it now in elementary school due to the many state’s tests but they still are doing a poor job in teaching spelling and grammar.
Along with testing, ask the teacher what writing programs are being used to teach your child how to write. I have used many programs to successfully remediate my eleventh graders to the point that they have to write a 3-5 page research paper for their final project.
Testing is meaningless if they aren’t using programs that will remediate.

I’d even ask to look at specific subtests like word attack, if that tends to be lower than passage comprehension

I don’t do a standardized test but I do running records at the end of each level of book and i also do the Star reading test three times a year. I think the leveled readers especially give me a good idea of my student’s progress. We graph their rate and their errors so that we can see how they are doing. I also give the Key math and I use a developmental checklist for writing and keep writing samples. I do not think it is always necessary to use a standardized test to measure progress.
Nan

I could see both points of view on this. I would understand a parent wanting a test repeated but for myself, I can ascertain progress from the student’s every day work. Even for my own LD son, I can ‘ballpark’ his progress from his schoolwork. Is it still just as much as a struggle? Do things seem to be getting better and is the student better able to handle their work in school?

You never know till you ask. Good luck.

I have often been surprised htat my students are unaware of their progress because it’s happening gradually — and because they have believed for *so long* that no, they just aren’t good at this. So even when there was incontrovertible evidence, it seemed, of progress and success, they still perceived themselves as lacking. I make a real point of pointing out progress — not being all gushy about it because we’d both throw up :)) — just matter-of-factly duly noting that ‘hey, you used to have a lot of trouble with that!’ or ‘you realize we finished this book in X weeks. The first book took Y.’ or “hey, you’ve been getting homework in a lot more…”
I didn’t really understand this until some time in the middle of the summer when I found myself in front on a long bike ride with a guy whose abilities were well beyond my own. Well, except that they weren’t. Well, except that for the first 40 years of my life I was a consistent non-achiever in all things athletic. I realized that the excuses and rationalizations (“they’re just being nice”) sounded *exactly* like the things my students said (“this is a special school,” “she graded me easy”) when they were academically successful.

I really agree with this!!!! If you want an evaluation of a child’s writing then look at the child’s writing not a standard score on the Woodcock Johnson. How is the child being taught to express herself in writing and how is she being taught to improve that expression? Is she making gains toward becoming an adult who can use written expression in her daily living experiences or is she just learning to respond to a prompt on the Woodcock Johnson?

Shay writes:

This year I teach eleventh grade and I had to start with teaching the parts of speech and subject verb agreement.

Well, Shay, honest to God, in one of the *better* high schools in your general area (Eleanor Roosevelt, which we had fought and selectively tested to get her into) my daughter came home one day with an assignment paper *from her teacher* which contained *seven major errors of grammar* including the memorably and sick-humorously self-referential

“Make sure the subject and verb agrees.”

It was also in dreadful grade-school handwriting and a pale ditto,. but the above is enough to tell you the level of “teaching” we were dealing with, and that in the best school in the district.

If you’re going to argue on a basis of facts, you need facts to back you up, right?
If educational decisions for your child are being made on the basis of personal opinions, prejudices, and convenience, force the school out in the open to admit it.

The school gives a certain test of choice to evaluate level. OK, so the WJ was chosen; the ONLY way you can get facts about progress (on the topics being measured by that test) is to give the *same* test each year.

Think about going on a diet. If you diet for three weeks and then weigh 160 pounds, so what? What did you weigh before you started? If you start at that 160 and try a different diet for a month, so what? Better find out what you weigh now. You need *both* measures for comparison. And they had better be comparable measures — a weight of 160 one month, a 30% body fat measurement the next month, and a patented metabolism score of 25.7 the third month tell you absolutely nothing, because they are different measures. Each might have its own value, but you have to do the *same* one twice to measure progress. If you change tests, you give the old test now to compare to last year, *and* you also give the new test now as a baseline for next year.

In tutoring I use a teaching interview reading a graded book. If the student is unable to read Book 1 in October and can read Book 6 fluently by March, well, we have there a comparable measure which shows progress. And it is demonstrable, not opinion and feelings. Multiple-choice tests are certainly not the only way to measure; but since the schools use them and depend on them and report them to high schools and state boards, well, then they need to use them in a way that gives some facts to use to measure progress or lack thereof.

Thanks for not gushing. It makes me gag too.

I’ve also run into the self-esteem generation, who are honestly dreadfully hurt if you are not praising them constantly for existing and breathing. Unfortunately that’s neither a serious college class nor the real world.

It’s interesting that the kids know that it’s all a fake and make fun of it the instant the teacher’s back is turned, but somehow they accept the inane praise in the classroom; a form of double-think. I’ve never understood this. My culture and generation was hard-headed and laughed a few teachers out of the classroom.

I wrote privately to the poster, but thought that others might also have good advice.

The teaching at my daughter’s school has been inconsistent. Evidently teachers are not required to use the official school curriculum, and every teacher approaches teaching language differently. They do use DOL — Daily oral language worksheets — where the kids learn punctuation and capitalization, but the teachers don’t seem to teach grammar with the intensity that I remember from my elementary school days. Instead the kids do a lot of journaling, but journal entries are not corrected for spelling or grammatical errors.

So I have started giving my daughter extra homework in addition to what she brings home from school. She just finished Book 8 in the Explode the Code series which worked on spelling of multiple syllable words and vocabulary development. Can you reccommend any other workbook based program that will help teach the basis of writing and grammar? ( am sure that many of you teachers don’t like workbooks, but they help both my daughter and me stay focused in our supplemental homeschool.)

Has anyone used the Language Wise program put out by Read America? Any feedback on this program?

Thanks again,
Jody