This is what the school Psychologist wrote about my Child.

They also Wrote : The Beery-Buktencia Developenmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration Standard score 85 which is Age Equivalent 6.2 . My daughter is 9years old.

Betty,
You may get a better response from the parenting an ld child board or teaching an ld student board.
Amy

Get her cognitive rehab. I believe if some of the subtests were thrown out in her areas of deficet her full scale IQ would be high normal. Her areas of deficet can be rehabilitated. I would also get her reevaluated by a private neuro psychologist.

The good and bad news on sequencing deficits.
Bad news;
Sequencing affects everything. Motor planning, writing, math, etc
Good news;
Sequencing deficits can be remediated.
Interactive metronome helped my son tremendously with this particular area. It has also been shown to improve sequencing in well designed studies.

I would consider doing PACE or audiblox after interactive metronome.

Get an occupational therapy eval from the school. You may need to request this in writing. You may need to push for this.

You may also at some point want to have your child evaluated by a developmental optometrist for that visual motor deficit.

i am an occupational therapy student. I agree that you should definately push for occupational thearpy within the school. At home you can do many activities with her such as puzzles, card games or other board games. These activities invilve sequencing what is next in a series. If she is doing math, etc, ask her what she thinks she needs to do next, and then ask questions in the right direction if she doesnt know. any other questions you can just email me.

Struggle if not futile builds character.

View the test results carefully. Schools love to underrate kidsbecause it lets them off the hook for being poor educators.

Gary Robedeau

Study of stimulant therapy raises concerns
Bruce Bower

The first long-term effort to track stimulant therapy in a large population of children has generated disturbing results. In particular, the North Carolina–based study finds that most 9-to-16-year-olds receiving Ritalin or other stimulants don’t exhibit attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the only condition for which such drugs are approved.

More encouraging, about 3 of 4 kids who were diagnosed with ADHD on the basis of parents’ behavioral reports received stimulants, says a team led by psychiatric epidemiologist Adrian Angold of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. Youngsters with ADHD often benefit from these medications, especially if also given behavioral training (SN: 12/18&25/99, p. 388: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/12_18_99/fob1.htm). Still, more than half of all stimulant users in the study fell short of even a relaxed definition of ADHD.

Children prescribed a stimulant typically took it for more than 3 years, regardless of their psychiatric status, the researchers note. Stimulant treatment helped kids with ADHD but had no effect on parent-reported symptoms of inattention or hyperactivity that didn’t qualify as ADHD. However, children taking these drugs proved more likely than the others to exhibit muscle tics, a side effect of prolonged stimulant use.

The prevalence of stimulant treatment among all the children doubled over 4 years to nearly 10 percent, supporting other evidence from medical databases of rises in numbers of stimulant prescriptions. “Our findings [also] suggest that current treatment practice in the community is far from optimal,” the researchers contend in the August Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“The system for the treatment of ADHD among children and adolescents is broken,” comments psychiatrist Kelly Kelleher of the University of Pittsburgh.

Angold’s team recruited 1,422 children, ages 9 to 13, from public schools in largely rural parts of western North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. Annual psychiatric interviews with children and collection of data from parents occurred from 1992 to 1996. By then, data were available for participants up to age 16.

Ninety-two of the children displayed ADHD, the scientists say. Another 63 kids met criteria for a less severe version of the disorder. Of the 168 children receiving stimulants during the study, one-third had full-blown ADHD and fewer than one-tenth exhibited the milder form.

That leaves more than half of the stimulant-treated kids as never having had ADHD. Many children not treated with stimulants had as many or more ADHD symptoms as those who took the medication but didn’t have ADHD.

Among those with ADHD, a much larger proportion of boys and 9- to 12-year-old children received stimulants than did girls and older children. The latter two groups may get too little stimulant treatment, the researchers suggest.

Stimulant treatment of children without ADHD occurred half as often among children living in poor households as among those in families above the federal poverty line.

In the same journal, Peter S. Jensen, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, calls the new study “a masterful achievement.” Nonetheless, by relying only on parent reports and not teacher ratings, Angold’s group probably underestimated ADHD rates, Jensen holds. He’s concerned that many children with ADHD get either no or inadequate stimulant treatment (SN: 8/7/99, p. 90).

Evidence of extensive stimulant treatment among children who don’t have ADHD is “surprising and perplexing,” remarks psychiatrist Benedetto Vitiello of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. Researchers should do larger studies of kids in different communities to probe this issue, he says.

References:

Angold, A., et al. 2000. Stimulant treatment for children: A community perspective. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 39:(August):975-984. Abstract available at http://ipsapp002.lwwonline.com/content/getfile/2600/1/9/abstract.htm.

Further Readings:

Bower, B. 1999. Kid’s ADHD care gets a wake-up call. Science News 156(Dec. 18&25):388. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/12_18_99/fob1.htm.

______. 1999. Prescription for restraint in ADHD. Science News 156(Aug. 7):90.

Sources:

Adrian Angold
Developmental Epidemiology Program
Duke University Medical Center
Box 3454
Durham, NC 27710

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To elaborate, someone stole my user name and was posting nasty things under it. I asked the moderator to delete these posts and they were…however with the nasty posts gone my response to them looks odd.

Sorry.

Barb

Betty,

Just to see how you are doing after what sounds like an upsetting experience. On the plus side, as a third grader, your child is young enough to learn to compensate for problems. Occupational therapy sounds like a good idea to help with the visual motor deficits. Be sure to ask for activities to do at home.

As for the sequencing, ask for directions and steps in a process to be written so she can see them, and refer back.

Mostly, please have a great summer and do not , although it must be hard, let her see your worries.

The psychologist’s work sounded rigorous until that “statistically significant at the 0.15 level.” remark. Typically, in this context, you would be talking about a statistical term known as a P value. If P = 0.15, this is not a rigorous statement that there is a difference between the verbal comprehension and perceptual organization scores. It means that there is not enough of a data set to make that determination.

I don’t know what this would mean for the rest of the psychologist’s work, but knowing how to interpret P values is one of the more basic skills in interpreting tests like this. If she went on to explain some other test of significance other than P value, never mind, but P value is pretty standard. If she didn’t explain that it was P value or some other measure she was using, I’d take that kind of non-rigorous reporting as a blemish as well.

Underkick

Reply to bgb?

Not to worry. I think before long this individual will steal all our user names and write bad things under them. I can tell it was the same person who wrote the remarks under the ADD forum. I don’t think most of us are fooled.

—des

What this all means in English.

>Victoria presents as an 8years old 3rd grade student who has perceptual organization and sequencing difficulties that are indicative of a student with

Ok you know about sequencing— but doesn’t differentiate sequencing— is it visual or auditory or both. If it is both then she needs shorter sentences. Don’t say “Victoria honey will you please do such and such and after your done with that would you mind …” Give her one task at a time in a short sentence. Visual sequening might be one of her problems in reading. She isn’t remembering the sequences. Might check out things like Lindamood Bells Seeing Stars and the math program. I think these are parent friendly (unlike the LiPs).

>a leaning disability. Victoria lacks planning and organizational skills. Her

Organization skills. You can help her in concrete ways. I would use visual calendars and also make something like a visual day runner for her classes and any activities. Help her organize her supplies using color coding and things like that.

>strengths include short term auditory memory abilities and visual motor ability for simple tasks. When the visual motor require a higher level of i

Short term auditory memory is good meaning that if you don’t highly sequence your directions they will be understood and remembered.
Visual motor is using eye and hand together. Good for things like handwriting (barring other problems), working with small objects lilke legos, beading, etc), art, etc.

Now these are her scores from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
Verbal IQ: 90 (84-97 Normal range)
Performance IQ: 83 (77-93 Normal Range)
Dull Scale IQ:86 (81-92 normal range)

Normal, and that’s dual score not dull score. :-)
Her verbal score is higher, meaning she is better with words (as most girls are) than working with her hands (kind of conflicts with other comments). But the performance tests include a couple that she might have been worse at, that are not workign with hands, include rearranging blocks to make a pattern (pattern recognition, duplication, etc.), putting pictures together to make a story; and coding (has abstract symbols, kids have to go back and forth on page, might be tricky with visual memory problems).

>Her achievement Test scores were:
Basic Reading = Grade score 2.9
Math = grade score 2.3
reading comp= grade score3.6 (Couldnt understand this ?)
numerical operations = grade score 2.0

That’s reading comprehension. Means that she understands above or at grade level. So reading is basically a decoding problem. How was she taught to read? Might be a good question here as if she was taught to read using whole language that could be part of the problem (but not all of it).

>Then they go on to write Victoria;s overall cognitive functioning was >assessed with a standard score of 86 indication funtioning within the low average range of learning potiental On the verbal subtatest she performed

I would take this to mean “normal”. She is better at verbal stuff than nonverbal stuff but ten points isn’t too big a deal here. If it were 40 points or something it might be a bit more significant! It is (or might be— really doesn’t sound it)*statistically* significant but that doesn’t necessarily mean real world significant. I don’t think it means much.

I just get the jist of things that she is a kid of normal intelligence– this qualifies her as ld vs having other disabilities like mental retardation. The school psychologist oked her for ld services. Ld services will include reading, math, and anything else implied by some of the other things s/he mentioned.

HTH,

—des

I always suggest reading out loud to any child especially those with learning differences. Try to build it into your daily routine. Victoria should also read 15-20 minutes a day in books that are easy for her to read to practice her skills. That 15 minutes a day can pay off!

For her planning and organization, try this. Start a simple task with her such as putting things away or even baking cupcakes or planning a garden. Ask her - what will we do first? Encourage her by that to think in a straight line way. Then ask, ‘what shall we do next? This can help her to see that most tasks are made up of small steps one done after the other.

For organization, put shelves in her room and together consider the catagories of her toys. Encourage her to think in catagories eg. all dolls on the top shelves, all books on the second shelf etc.

Good luck.