WJ or WIAT which one do you prefer

Far shorter than the WJIII would be the Gray Oral Reading Test and the Test of Written Language.

Sue—

These are all norm-referenced tests. The are admissable into court proceedings and hold up. With some exceptions, they are not as efficient for instructional planning. They generally cannot be given more than once per year unless two forms exist (which is true for some).

The Woodcock Johnson III has a subtest called “Sound Awareness” that measures phonological ability. It also has a subtest to measure reading rate. This is all well & good if you are not planning on going into any litigation. (I say this because you won’t get absolute statistical evidence from one subtest—reliability is not high enough. In the other tests mentioned below, you are combining scores to form clusters which makes them more reliable.)

There is a norm-referenced test called the Phonological Awareness Test. I haven’t used it, perhaps others know it.

For reading, I use the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT-R) or the Woodcock Diagnostic Reading Battery. I like the Gray Oral Reading except it doesn’t have that good decoding piece. It does has a nice fluency component that the WRMT-R or the WDRB are missing.

For Written Language, I like the Test of Written Langauge (TOWL). It is quite comprehensive. It is time-consuming to score and some school people don’t like it for that reason.

Hope others pop in with their thoughts, too.

I agree with Susan that these tests are not the best for determining exact needs and for writing IEP goals, despite the fact that some of the advocates are telling parents this is somehow otherwise. These are not really diagnostic tests, but standardized. They serve a different purpose.

For eligibility purposes, and for triennials, we give the WIAT and the WJ-III. We are not supposed to base eligibility on one test. I also use a number of more or less criterion-referenced measures: some I have developed and informal reading inventories. These also measure growth and assist with writing and measuring goals and objectives.

I give the WJ-III at each annual review to assess growth as one more measure and piece of information I furnish to parents.

Sorry to butt in here - but your post caught my eye. (Plus you’ve been so helpful to me on the parent board!)

My son scores quite high on the sound awareness portion of the WJII, (over 7th grade level while he was in 2nd grade), but below grade level on the Phoneme/grapheme piece. I’ve read up on the distinction between phonemic awareness and phonological processing - but I’m still not clear on the signifigance of these 2 scores. One psychologist pointed to the high sound awareness score as an indication that’s he’s not dyslexic , others have looked at the phoneme/grapheme score as a red flag. Further testing (and I don’t have the report yet so I don’t know what tests were used) indicated low phonemic awareness and a dx of dyslexia. Is it possible to have phonological processing problems typical of dyslexia and still do well on the Sound Awareness?

Subtests on Phoneme/Grapheme Cluster: 1) Word Attack—Reading phonetically regular non-words requiring an oral response; and 2) Spelling of sounds—Spelling letter combinations that are regular patterns in written English—requiring a written response.

Sound awareness, OTOH, is an oral response subtest requiring the examinee to provide rhyming words; deleting, substituting, and reversing parts of words to make new words from an *auditory* cue (like the spelling—but it requires conversion from sound to symbol.)

Your note tells me that your child does well at hearing sound changes but becomes confused when the visual stimulus of letters is added. I think he ought to do well with a good OG tutor and skip the LmB, unless he’s missing some of the most basic sounds (isn’t producing correctly or isn’t hooked to sounds for basic symbols such as p/b, t/d, k/g, s/z, f/v, ch/j, and proper sounds for long/short vowels for each letter.)

Not every dyslexic has poor phonemic awareness, but a huge volume of them do have that problem. Estimated 80% by NICHD a couple of years ago.

I would suggest that you try not to get too hung up on labels—go for service qualifications with the norm-referenced testing (such as WJIII)—then plan programming to help the student read. Your child’s teachers should be able to perform a task analysis from these subtests.

The VAKT (visual/auditory/tactile/kinesthetic) nature of Orton should help your child to cement the phoneme/ grapheme piece. Aren’t you in NYC with the new-found O-G tutor?

Susan

We do have a new tutor who is OG certified, but I’m nervous because I don’t know exactly what she’s doing. She uses other materials as well …
We went with her b/c she’s also a psychologist and our first evaluator really stressed the anxiety as a part of his problem. She’s very experienced though, so I have to assume she’ll use the appropriate materials during their sessions.

We just got results of some follow up testing done by a different psychologist (the one that has concluded that he is dyslexic) . He administored the Rosner test of auditory analysis and the Gray oral, WRAT-R, and the Gallistel elis test of coding. I don’t need to post the results - they stink.

Its interesting that his scores on the Gray went down since his big neuropsych eval last spring and yet in real life he’s reading better. More sight words memorized perhaps?

I do agree that the label doesn’t matter, I’ve just been trying to figure out the appropriate intervention based on what his problems are or are not.

What about Lindamood Bell Seeing Stars? Wouldn’t that be a place to connect the symbol and sound?

Thanks for your thoughts here and on the other boards…

There are some subtle differences, however, both stress sound/symbol relationship and both are multi-sensory. I have the Seeing Stars manual and the small differences weren’t enough to make me change from O-G on a regular basis. They are *very* similar.