coping with test scores

micky

I don’t think you ever stop worrying about your child, but it sounds like you are doing what you need to do right now. (ps, I am formerly of NYC, just moved to the burbs essentially so my dyslexic son could attend a school out here…. )

focus on what she needs now, and recognize that you know many adults with deficits that have found their niche. Its getting these kids through school that is the challenge I think.

You are pondering a huge issue we all go through - the loss of dreams of what we had for our kids. When I child is coming, we all have these big expectations, big dreams, big hopes, big desires. Then we come to find out our children are not blank slates that we write on, but really more like lumps of clay with exsisting characteristics that we hope we can mold and shape into someone happy and self sufficient. Due to the type of clay we rec’d we may only be able to mold the right side only so good, but better on the left side. The color of the clay is truly beautiful so we play up to that a lot. The texture we can’t do much about no matter how much money we throw at it.

Don’t let single scores get you down. It’s just one score over the course of her child’s childhood and youth and then she’ll be an adult and people will stop testing her and reducing her to numbers. Things always look worse paper (or better depending how it’s edited).

I can’t help with the scores question. However, I am wondering if the school is addressing basic, foundational, sensory deficits first. Many schools, even ones who specialize in working with these children, do not realize the importance of the foundational work. You may want to investigate and provide this kind of remediation on your own.

For a child with the problems you describe, I would be heavily stressing bodywork daily (occupational therapy, especially NeuroNet, which is specifically designed to address problems arising from auditory processing disorders) and sound therapies (TLP and FastForWord especially, but other options include Samonas, AIT-Berard, and Tomatis). You may also want to investigate Balametrics (http://www.balametrics.com ), Interactive Metronome, and consider Dance Dance Revolution for Playstation2. (I have seen DDR every morning before school help with concentration and focus. Probably also helps sensory integration.)

I don’t want to be out of line, but it just seems to me that if appropriate therapies were being provided with enough intensity, you would be seeing more improvements in test scores. Granted children can have very severe problems, but normally I see some kind of positive trend in scores no matter how severe the initial problems — provided enough of the right kinds of things are provided. For a child of 6yo, lots and lots of sensory and bodywork are in order. Speech and language may not respond very well to therapy if an auditory processing disorder has been allowed to persist (without attempts at sound therapy to reduce the auditory processing deficit).

Nancy

Hi Micki,
I understand your feelings. My son also has some very low test scores in those areas you’ve described.

The way I’ve dealt with this problem is to try and educate myself about different programs that might help remediate my child’s weakness.

One positive thing, your daughter is young and there are a lot of things you can do that may help. This list is a wonderful resource for information and support.

Besides looking into the programs Nancy has described, you may also want to pick up “Language Wise” from the library or bookstore. It has a lot of fun language games that I’ve sometimes used with my son while driving in the car. From what you’ve described it sounds like you daughter may benefit most from a variety of programs (ie. physical combined with language).

My daughter is 11yrs old and have a lanuage disorder ever since she 2yrs. I took her to speech therapy twice a week for 6yrs and it did help some but there are still time I can’t understand her. I know if she talk really fast the word all go to together.She goes to a public school and get therapy at school. I will tell you she has alot of friends and get alot of help from her peers.

For me, homeschooling this year has led to the strongest acceptance I have ever felt for my LD son, now 12.

I am not suggesting you take this route, just sharing experience!

Your dd has strengths and those strength will carry her through real life even if she will never be an A student in school. IT is so easy to get hung up with school success and grades and test scores when that is part of your daily life.

Thats gone for us now and you know what? My son is a math whiz!! I never knew that because that strength was lost in all the focus on his deficits. He WILL do fine in life;he will find a match for his skills, interests and abilities and do more than function-he will be happy and productive because he has soooo many things going for him

When was the last time you risked losing your job because you couldnt categorize??? School skills are not life skills!

Speech? My son was in speech from the age of 22 months until this last fall(few months short of 12) I agonized over losing speech by homeschooling(yes, they still need to provide it but I didnt want the scheduling hassle)

Has it made a difference? Nope! Is he perfectly understandable? Nope! But he wasn’t after 10 long years of speech either!

I think there has actually been a big leap in his speech skills the past 2 months-confidence? maturity? the reading aloud daily? luck? no one drawing attention to his flaws? Who knows?

Dont get so caught up in the scores and %s you lose sight of her strengths! I know I did exactly that, and I am glad Im back on track(yes, I did remediate his reading problems;I’m not saying ignore her issues;just dont let them ovewhelm you)

Micki,
I’m assuming the 7% was in the Peabody Picture Test—my ds scored 3% at age 5. We did language therapy, Fastforward I and Fast Forward II and, because he still couldn’t budge above 10% in the Peabody, intensive language therapy focusing on vocabulary the summer he turned 10. This allowed him to put together a lot of the things he had had earlier. By the end of summer he was scoring in 90%iles. Low %iles are not etched in stone. With a lot of remediation, they will change, sometimes spectacularly (although getting 90%ile on the Peabody was way beyond my most aggressive hopes).

People will react differently to the scores. Personally, I am the type that sets up goals in my mind and tries to meet them. Being somewhat numbers oriented, these goals are usually numbers—a reason I like the tsting and percentiles—they measure how far we’ve gone in meeting the goals and give me an indication of where the next bar should be set. I guess that, in short, I saw my ds’s pathetically low scores as a challenge I could not resist—and how we did in meeting the challenge was objectively measured in the next test. The perfect set up for a person like me.

I was always encouraged by any sign of progress, and if there was a setback I was always on the lookout for ways to remediate more effectively. (Huge thanks to all the posters to LDonline.) My ds, now 13, is not totally out of the woods. But I am quite sure that when he was 5 or 6 none of the experts looking at him would have said it would be possible that he would have a shot at a high school that required an SSAT for admission. Following intense preparation by me, he took the test last week (with extra time accomodation), so once again I’m waiting for those scores to come in. If they are not great, we’ll come up with Plan B. But getting to the point where we could even contemplate him taking it would have seemed impossible seven or eight years ago.

Thanks so much to all of you for your extremely helpful responses to my questions. After I posted here I also had a very helpful conversation with the school principal about this question and she pointed out that these tests are done specifically to diagnose where the issues are … and that we aren’t looking at the performance side of, say, her IQ tests. In other words, don’t worry to much about it.

Regarding the sensory integration issues, she gets OT 2x30 1:3 every week, and then has a whole array of afterschool and Saturday activities … gymnastics, music classes, etc.

I would be very interested to hear more about the experiences of other parents of kids with auditory processing/language processing disorders who’ve used some of the auditory integration therapies and some of the language programs like Language Fast Forword. Perhaps I will do a search on this BB before posting a question topic.

Anyway, many thanks to all of you.

Micki,

You may want to look at the www.ncapd.org site for more information on auditory processing. But I will tell you, with multiple issues like your child has, I’d be looking for therapy outside of school. Few schools offer the best therapies, unfortunately and few special kids reach their potential without outside intervention. If you have never had private testing done, I’d highly suggest that you do so.

Janis

Tests are imperfect things. Let’s remember the real test of us all is life itself and pencil and paper tests have little to do with real life. Is your dear daughter happy in her school? If she is, she’s way ahead of the game as many children these days, ld or not, are not happy in school.

And your daughter has many years ahead of her before she strikes out on her own. We don’t all grow and develop at the same pace and she has time to grow her skills.

What if the test results had been different? What would that say to you? It would offer comfort that everything is moving along. Do you see your daughter’s growth? If you do, take your comfort in that and ignore the silly pencil and paper tests they give. I learned that tests are flawed and rarely measure anything well.