LD testing has been recommended for my 11 year old. I would appreciate any information or advice about tests to avoid or tests to request. This is a very complex child and if anyone has a similar situation, you can help me.
The child was diagnosed with a CAPD at 8 1/2 years of age but no other testing was recommended. After 2 years of CAPD therapy, retesting shows improvement but areas of deficit indicate possible LD now. She is not working at grade level in school with CAPD accomodations. She also has some emotional issues due to first 7 years of neglect and abuse in her biological family. She had serious speech deficits when she came to our family at age 7 which are almost entirely corrected. She also has social skill deficits which have had minimal improvement. Each person involved has his/her own recommendations — from her school, a therapist, and a psychologist, recommendations are: 1) let the school do the LD testing; 2) let our local university perform testing (grad students will perform multi-disciplinary testing); 3) have assessment performed by a neuro-psychiatrist. I don’t know which would be better but I know her emotional issues will impact her performance testing. Any experience or opinions out there????
Re: Need testing advice
We had a reading/language evaluation at a university once and it was very good and reasonably priced. Doing evaluations privately gives you control over whether you want to release the results. But there is usually nothing wrong with school testing except is is often not very thorough. We have done both school and private testing.
Janis
Re: Need testing advice
We had our son tested privately by a neuropsychologist. It was expensive.
The plus, however, was that she didn’t have anything to lose or gain — and she was able to do emotional testing as well as intelligence and achievement testing.
Hi,
I would definitely try the University because you will probably get a more thorough and friendly examination if they have a dynamic multi-diciplinary team. I like the ITPA-3 the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities and the DTLA-4 Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude-4
If you want to look at Written Expression the TOWL Test of Written Language is a good one to use to see how she organizes her writing, spelling etc… If you want to look at Phonological processing the CTOPP Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing is a good one…
The CELF-4 is the latest revision of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Fourth Edition which tests a child’s language difficulties expressive and receptively. For receptive vocabulary the PPVT-3 is a good one and the EOWPVT expressive one word picture vocabulary test for the expressive langauge…and I would definitely look into a test of both Auditory and Visual Vigilance to rule out Attention issues.
You may want to see about some tests that look at how she performs in a classroom i.e., something like the Language Processing Test. Also one can glean a lot of great information from her classwork, how she completes it, does she stick to things or is she helter skelter with her completion of things…etc.