getting on the same page with school

Lulu,

I’ll try to be concise and focused—always a challenge for me>

> Given my son’s test scores (WISC, WIAT and WRAML), how does
> the school determine what they feel his anticipated
> achievement should be. Is there a formula that they use to
> determine this, or is it subjective just like progress reviews?

In my school district, it is subjective. I consider other needs present: OT, Speech, Language, Social, Emotional, etc. In the absence of those, I would give a listening comprhension test of some sort, if not already given. Some researchers say that it is a predictor of where the student will max-out at the time of testing. (Carver is the researcher, I think.) Just as the physician will test his hypothesis, I test-out 1.5 grade-levels per year (sometimes two with students who have rich vocabulary and supportive parents) and see how the student is doing at semester and at the end of third-quarter toward GnO’s benchmarks. In private tutorial (1:1) I plan for quicker gains because I’m gearing instruction to only one student but still use the listening comprehension ability as a partial measurement of expectations.

I try to make my GnO’s measurable and clear so we know if we are hitting the target or need to adjust. If I’m not hitting the mark, I take my lumps and adjust the goals to try something different.

> I want to be an equal player, right now I am not. How do I
> determine what is reasonable achievement for my son? Once I
> know this, maybe I will be more of a team player and know
> what my next step should be. Right now, with the information
> that I have, verses their summation of his abilities, it is
> us against them. I don’t believe that we see the same issues.
>
You have to trust your parental instincts. They generally ferret out some measure of truth. Follow your nose, but remember that you get more useful information when school views you as an ally than as an opponent.>

> Thank you for your patience as I have probably asked this
> question 17 times in some round-about way, and you dear
> people have tried to help me before I’m sure.

Thank you for your patience with the whole insane process!

“My primary goal for my son is to have him reading on grade level.” With that goal in mind my questions to the school would be - What programs are you going to use to teach my child to read? How often will he receive these programs? How much training, experience, support will his teacher(s) have to help him reach that goal? How, when and how often will you evaluate his progress towards the goal of reading on grade level?

Remember that many of us in special ed were taught to slow down, do it again and be nice. I know now how ineffective those methods are when it comes to teaching reading. Now I know about research and programs. I also know that few in my former school district knew or cared to know as much. They were and still are content to let non-readers make minimal progress because they percieve it as more expensive to train teachers in effective reading programs.

I have been asking this questions myself lately. In my brothers IEP the parents main concern and goal over the next year is to increaase my brothers reading by one grade level. However, if he is reading on a third grade level entering 9th grade, then that only increases it to fourth grade?!?

I am not sure what to write because I have yet to determine what reading program will be effective?

How much do I leave up to the school, as far as suggesting a reading program, and how much do I say, “This is what I have found through my own research?”

Thanks
K.

Susan,

Can you elaborate on how listening comprehension relates to reading potential? The tutor I had for my son tested his listening comprehension—which was maybe 102 on standard scale and made some connection to his reading potential. It still isn’t clear to me.

Beth

I feel that there are a number of good reading programs. Current research took two groups and taught one with an intensive phonics program and the other with a program where phonics were imbedded in with other skills. BOTH groups made considerable progress. The key being both programs were intensive, sequential, taught by skilled and experienced teachers who had materials and support. So, what reading program does your school use? How much training and how much experience does the teacher have? How often and for how much time will the child be instructed? I just know that as a teacher, I need training, materials and support to really teach children to read when they have not learned through traditional methods. As a parent I know that two hours a week with a clinic on my own wasn’t going to be enough for my son. The school needed to be doing similar things in special ed, in regular ed with me following up at home. This site has some articles in the archives about programs that work. I think that is a good place to start. If and when you feel a well-delivered program is not working then you may ask the school to look further. Document what is being done and monitor the child’s progress. My experience is that many people say well no one program works for every kid. Of course that is true, but schools should have various programs they can try. Too often they use that rational as an excuse to not train their teacher in anything.

<… what reading program does your school use? How much training and how much experience does the teacher have? How often and for how much time will the child be instructed?…>

My brother has been receiving Wilson for the last three years. We have not seen much progress but now after reading on Wilson, I am not sure that he received it enough and received it properly. That is in part what I hope the independent eval can answer.

I think that he also didn’t make progress with Wilson because there was no follow up in his regular ed classroom. He was given the grade level work and expected to understand it.

As I have mentioned before I am trying to get him to do Reading Reflex with me. I think he will really benefit from learning the advanced code portion of the book. I also am highly anticipating the IEE results.

Thanks
K.

Starting at a new school, and getting pumped up by this board, I m ready to advocate a little stronger for my kiddo this year

What he received at his old school was NOT any of the programs Ive heard about on this board. Essentially they did the exact same things they did in the classroom but in a smaller group-worksheets, telling him to slow down. No phonics-no Wilson-no Fast Forward-Id never have heard those words if it werent for this board.

So thats what Im planning to do in the new setting.

If the same ole, same old worked, hed be at grade level by now

I like Wilson and it has a very good reputation. Teachers have a lot of support material to do follow-up with students. But, you are right to wonder if his teacher was skilled and consistent and how was what he learned transferred to his other classes. I do think it is fair to say that Wilson has been given a fair amount of time and since he is still not making significant progress, what else can we do. When you go to the doctor with a headache, he does not just give you ____ aspirin and if that doesn’t work ___ aspirin. Eventually, the doctor will explore other treatments.

I think trying the same method in a smaller group is a good place to start, but when that doesn’t work it is time to use a strong accepted program taught by a skilled and experienced teacher. Games and tricks don’t teach our LD children to read.

Truthfully, educators really don’t KNOW what is a reasonable expectation. Researchers are conducting research to try to learn which markers (my term) in the student’s assessment profile may indicate more rapid or less rapid response to remedial instruction. Virginia Berninger from University of Washington is one who is looking at this, but at this point she only has some ideas gleaned from some research and more needs to be done.

I think someday we may have a better idea of whether a child will likely be a fast or a slow responder. She mentions, in one of her recent articles, fast responders being able to learn in 4 months what takes two years to teach slower responders. All had average ability, but the slow responders averaged about 5 pts. lower on measures of verbal IQ. She also used a phoneme deletion test she found to be a good predictor of who would respond more or less quickly.

We will never, as you I am sure know, have a crystal ball that will allow us to look into the future and tell anyone at what level, words per minute, etc. a given child will read on after a given period of remediation. We will never be able to control for internal motivation factors, the family support element, etc. These factors can make a very large difference in a child’s outcome.

I actually have, occasionally, a dyslexic child who just loves to read. These children read whenever they have excess time in my room from books that interest and challenge them, these children make progress, oftentimes more progress than their profile might suggest. We all also know people who don’t enjoy reading (not due to a reading disability, but perhaps more due to temperment) and these folks just plain don’t read (disability or not) and therefore progress is slower.

Estimating progress is always an estimate.

Angela, according to a research article i read a few months ago, it can take as many as 100 times more exposures for an LD child to learn a skill, than a nonLD. The difference can be HUGE, interms of the number of exposures and amount of instruction, the LD children usually need. Any way you cut it, even when you use good methodology, they still need to review, review, review and require far more time invested in the teaching process than nonLD. This time has to come from somewhere: the school day.

Like Virginia Berninger et all, found some first graders who are below grade level and placed in early intervention programs (O-G based), may learn basic decoding skills in 4 months time, others need two years. The difference between the rate of learning, given good teaching, between LD and nonLD average, can be easily 5 times (not adjusting for the fact that the LD child is receiving 45-60 or 90 minutes per day of small group or 1:1 in the resource room, while nonLDs are progressing in the general ed. curriculum where the teacher teaches 3 or more reading groups per day.

Basically, printed words are speech put into print. So if a kiddo can understand what he hears, but not what he reads, it’s the “translation” where things are coming apart. If it’s hard to comprehend what you hear, then it will also be hard to comprehend what you read even when you are getting the words right. (Of course, both can be improved.)

If listening comprehension (LC) is SS 102, then that is dead-on average for that child’s age. So, he should be capable of understanding vocabulary, drawing conclusions, making predictions, etc. at his age-level if only he knew what the words said. Therefore, if he could read the words at his age-level, he would understand what he has read.

I have been thinking about this for a little over two years now. I always use the LC piece on the John’s or Silveroli Reading Inventories when doing pre- and post-testing. I haven’t examined this data closely yet—there are some flaws due to more than one dependent variable in my hypothesis and I’m not sure what good it will do me. But, I believe I see a trend in the data: 6th grade students who read >2 years below their grade level who have LC skills <1 grade level deficient, make faster remediation progress. Like I said, it isn’t scientific.

Do an ERIC search for Ronald G. Carver. He’s the main guy on this subject, I think. Has even written a screening device for it. There are probably others cited in Carver. I haven’t read him for awhile.

**

I agree with you all all of your points. Very well said. Any advice on how to approach these questions in a non-confrontational matter that results in an actual answer? Should it be written down in their files somewhere that I can see and not have to take their word for things all of the time?

Seems when I ask these types of questions I automatically get an attitude and passed off to someone higher up, who unfortunately then treats me like a child who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

I appreciate your honesty on the subject. I go in with what I would like to happen. He’s in the classroom all day with his non-disabled peers, same grading system, same assignments, etc. They (IEP team) tell me that my expectations of him being average (not rocket scientist) should be lowered.

So, my question is, how are they making THIS assumption (that he can’t achieve average) and I am believing that he is very capable with proper instruction. We are looking at the same scores, and they are telling me that his scores make him average, he has closed his gap between VIQ and PIQ. Where are they getting this info that he can’t make it?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m still not getting to the right question yet or explaining myself properly on the posts? I’m just assuming that they have some sort of process for coming to this belief that I am not seeing?

Are they just guessing then and I should continue to pursue my belief that this is possible, if so how do I back up my beliefs that he can do this?

Well, you helped me make sense of the tutor’s comments. She had a hard time understanding why he was having so much trouble since he already could read fluently one year below grade level and his listening comprehension was average (post Fast Forward). I understood the former but not the later.

We’re starting a new approach today with a therapist he has worked with for some time that I hope will click. In any case, your comments give me some hope that if we can get past what seems to be blocking him, he may be a reader yet.

Beth

Aside from the CAPD interventions (if that is an issue), regular/normal learning interventions that assist with increasing listening comprehension:

1. Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary
2. Visualization
3. Inferencing/Drawing Conclusions & critical thinking
4. Connecting to text via personal experiences or prior learning experiences
5. Semantics/syntactics

Is (s)he strong at each of these?

Did I mention vocabulary? :-)

1. Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary
2. Visualization
3. Inferencing/Drawing Conclusions & critical thinking
4. Connecting to text via personal experiences or prior learning experiences
5. Semantics/syntactics

Is (s)he strong at each of these?

I would say no to all of them. He is good at vocabulary that is science or social studies related because we have read to him extensively. Even at age 4, he knew words on the ten year old list in the testing done by a speech and language therapist. But he doesn’t pick up anything he isn’t explicitly taught so I have seen this advantage disappearing as he has got older. He is now 9. I am constantly explaining to him things that other kids just get from context.

He can see pictures in his mind because I have asked him questions and had him describe them. I am sure he isn’t strong enough. I want to do V & V with him but the tutor I hired this summer started with LIPS and that just didn’t work out. I am hoping to find someone else this fall or I may just have to get the training myself.

I realized last year in third grade how weak he was at inferences. He just didn’t put things together. It was really pretty scary to realize that he not only had deficiencies in decoding but his higher level thinking skills aren’t very strong either.

I actually am not sure about the last two. I don’t see him bringing his experience to things. Perhaps it is his age but I’m inclined, given the answers to the first three, to think not.

I am not sure what semantics means for an 9 year old.

Yikes—this was a depressing post to write. I can see we are on a downwhirl spiral. I have started reading more demanding books to him in hopes of stimulating his ability to think. He has always loved science and facts types books but I can see that those types of books don’t challenge his weaknesses as much.

Beth