Auditory Processing and visual discrimination

Jennifer,

How is her reading decoding? If she comes to a new multi-syllable word, can she sound it out? You are indicating that she has to listen to some books on tape, so that makes me wonder if her reading skills are low. That would be a very important thing to remediate. Did Lindamood Bell test her? If so, they obviously would have identified any problems in that area. What makes you think she has problems in auditory processing or visual discrimination? Has she been evaluated in those areas?

Janis

I posted this same question on the ‘teaching LD’ board. She decodes at a 20yo level. However, her reading comp is at a 11yo level. She has always been an excellent decoder and her reading comp was a ‘concern’ in comparison -however it didn’t show up as a problem on any testing until she was in 5th grade. She is also Bipolar and had a breakdown at the beginning of the 5th grade. (that is when I pulled her out and enrolled her in a home-based (public) charter school) Now, her IQ has stayed the same for the past 3yrs and the school is saying that she doesn’t have the potential ‘gain-back’ her original IQ-that it is the BP that caused this. If it is I can accept this - however I’m not entirely convinced. So, according to the school her low reading comp is within her ‘ability range’ although they can’t explain why her decoding skills are in the superior range. She also has discrepancies between her speech testing (high average - average range) and verbal portion of the IQ test (borderline range). The school through out her verbal IQ score because it was 17pts lower than the performance score- they determined this score was more accurate (89). I never did get an explanation on why she scored so low on the verbal portion.

The WISC showed weaknesses in auditory processing and visual discrimination. The school is stating that this is not LD because she didn’t show siginificant weaknesses in these areas when she was initially tested in 3rd grade. The school state, “You cannot aquire a learning disability, you are born with it, therefore she does not have one.”

still-frustrated

Jen momto13yo

That is not correct. Your daughter needs to be evaluated for her present levels of performance regardless of how she did in third grade.

Does it really matter if she is labeled LD since you are homeschooling anyway?

If it does, then it sounds like to me that your daughter needs a good neuropsychological evaluation outside of the school in order to get a handle on her learning issues. School testing is very superficial.

Janis

I’d go back to them and say “she may have had a learning disability. The testing the shcools do is not designed to determine whether or not a disability is present — the purpose of the testing process is to determine whether a student’s disability is such that it affects their educational needs. In third grade, there was enough evidence of a disabiloity so that testing was done; she was not determined eligible for services. However, you feel that at this point a disability which could well have been present in third grade, but did not affect her education to the point that she needed an IEP, seems to be doing that now. If you feel she could benefit from services I woudl start the paperwork rolling — who at the school said the bit about the LD being something she’d be born with? Could very well be that person would not particularly want to look foolish by being quoted to someone who knew the legalities of special ed.
With older students I tend to work on skills directly — but then, that’s what I’m trained to do, and it’s necessary regardless of what else is done with the underlying problem. WHat are her skill weaknesses?
It’s basically true that your verbal IQ is a better indicator of how you’re going to handle “school stuff” — because so much school stuff is verbal. However, that verbal IQ is also fairly flexible (it’s really not something you’re born with that’s set in stone — just think for a minute or two about how much our verbal development is influenced by our environment).

It’s actually a homebased publicly funded charter school. She does school at home and has a credentialed teacher come out every 20 days to take a record of what she has been taught, (plus samples of her work). It does give us the option to teach her in her own ‘learning style’ and be creative in how she shows understanding of her work.

Once she reaches high-school next year if it is not documented in an IEP that she is behind in certain areas she will not get credit for many classes unless she can ‘perform’ at a highschool level. The school is responsible for providing special-ed (resource) if a need is found. The new spec-ed director is very knowledgeable of CA rules & regs. My daughter did not show a ‘severe discrepancy’ between ability and achievement based on her current IQ score, because it is so low. In CA this must be shown unless the testing was invalid OR the team can prove that there IS a severe discrepancy based on other methods (besides the testing). I was told that special-ed was not responsible for her being behind because she was functioning within her ‘ability range’. (there HAS to be a 22 1/2pt difference between ability and achievement) All of the other discrepancy formulas that other states also allow-CA unfortunately does not accept. (for ex. she had a 12 in object assembly but a 3 in symbol search)

Our problem lies within her ability IQ NOW vs her achievement scores. There just isn’t enough of a spread to continue to qualify her for academic help. She will have more testing done, but if the scores come out the same, and the school will ONLY use the lower score she will not qualify. UNLESS I allow her to be classified as ED and the rsp teacher comes to work on behavioral goals towards math. <g>

I don’t know HOW to get the school to allow the intial IQ score (111) vs (89) so that she can continue to at least get credit for highschool.

I KNOW I can teach her but I will probably question whether I am addressing her weak areas with the right approach. (she did have a speech teacher who taught Lindamood Bell - but no longer) She wants to be a Marine Biologist - she just got done watching 14hrs of Shark Week (discovery channel) that I had taped for her- and made posters of Atlantic and Pacific Ocean sharks & their habitats. How can I tell her that she isn’t ‘smart’ enough to even get a highschool diploma?

Jen-mom to 13yo

{{{hugs}}} I know this is a tough one. However, there are lots of careers that aren’t “Marine biologist” where she could use her skills and strengths and still be around animals she loves.
Don’t count on her not graduating high school… there are students I’m working with at the community college who I happen to know have IQs in that 80-90 range. You working with her would probably be better than what the school would come up with — possibly not *the* right one but … well… you’ve got a little more invested in her and you just plain know her better. (How well does she work with you, though?)
It sounds like they really have you strung up in a loophole, though it might be worth arguing that since she has that older, higher IQ, they should *not* take the single lwoer performance score as the criteria to balance it with. Do they have any documentation that BP causes a drop in IQ? I’m not aware of such a thing. Traumatic Brain Injury, perhaps…
But… if they’re that good at pulling the loopholes around… the kiddo could be serving an awfully long sentence while you’re wrestling with bureaucrats.

I’ve been schooling her for 3yrs and she absolutely loves it. I have found two moms with children that have the same needs who ‘school’ my older 2 children twice a week. We are using mathusee and she is coming along (slowly) but steadily. I had a resource teacher show me how to use Project Read ‘Framing Your Thoughts’ and she likes it. She still struggles with descriptive (more than fine or good) words, so now I have her making mad libs. We have a word list that is broken down into parts of speech and catagories, this has seemed to help. I also have a 17yo Asperger/psychosis-nos son who Loves descriptive words so she also has plenty of exposure. I also have her play catagorization games with her younger (8yo DD brother). {He attends a ILS-SDC}

The community college in our area has programs for students who are low-average and also learning disabled. I know she will be successful in whatever she chooses. She is content and doesn’t have any idea that I am even worried about her learning. I have talked to her about her strengths and how she is going to have some more tests to see if we can figure out why some of her schoolwork is difficult. -I sure hope the outside evaluations shed some light on where the breakdown is in her weak areas.

The school doesn’t have any documentation that states BP can cause severe cognitive declines; they just state what it possibly can’t be-so all that is left is the BP. Her psychiatrist said medication and symptoms alone would not be the cause of such a severe decline. I have found information on cognitive dysfunction in relation to schizophrenia, but there is not enough data available to report on how it impacts BP long-term.

The school makes me Furious in with their use of ‘tactics’. After she has the outside evaluations if I can’t find a way for her to receive help I am going to give up the fight. I pulled her out of reg. public school because I was tired of fighting; I guess I have been lucky that we went 3yrs in the charter school before it got drug into ‘politics’.

I have one year before I start the special-education credential program. It makes me wonder how I will be able to effectively help LD students with the amount of politics involved.

Thanks for the support and hugs-

Jen (mom to 3 special needs children :)

I can’t help with the school issues. However, if you want to pursue testing on your own in order to better determine approaches that would help, I would suggest (1) getting a developmental vision evaluation and (2) getting an auditory processing evaluation.

You can find out more about vision at http://www.childrensvision.com and find board-certified professionals at http://www.covd.org .

There is some auditory processing information at http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/ and you can find qualified audiologists (regular audiologists cannot assess auditory processing) at http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/capd-rf1.html

Also, I would probably start Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com ), which is usually very helpful in strengthening underlying learning skills and often positively impacts IQ test scores. PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ) tends also to be very effective at raising IQ test scores in a short period of time, if you can afford it.

My reasoning here is that your daughter may have lost some cognitive skills during her illness. Since cognitive skills greatly impact IQ test scores, this could explain the drop in IQ score. Re-training those skills could be an effective means of regaining the old score.

Nancy