My Visit to Dr. Mel Levine's All Kinds of Minds Clinic

This week I went to Dr. Mel Levine’s All Kinds of Minds Clinic (NC) with one of my tutoring students (age 7, repeating first grade) who was being evaluated. I thought I’d report on the experience in the event anyone is thinking of going there (clinics in NY and NC). I asked his mom if I could post about it as long as I kept the names confidential and she gave her permission. We were told that the evaluation is customized to the child’s needs and level, so other children might have a different battery of tests than this child. We arrived at 8:30 am, and I’d estimate that the testing started about 9:00 or so. We were scheduled to complete testing at 12:30, but it was actually completed at 1:00. After lunch, we came back for the conference and recommendations. This evaluation was in the low $2000 range.

First of all, the facility was beautiful and the people were extremely nice and professional. The parents had sent in case history information prior to the appointment. The child’s hearing and vision was screened first. Next, the learning specialist took him to do some educational testing. The mother and I watched the entire evaluation over a computer monitor using headphones for the audio. It was a very efficient arrangement.

As far as I could tell, there were no complete standardized tests given. In the educational portion, they checked reading, writing, and math. Some of the reading tasks included: identifying sounds and letter names, word recognition, reading sentences, nonsense word decoding, reading a predictable book with pictures, listening to a story and answering questions. For spelling, he only had to identify the correctly spelled word in a set (spelling recognition). She dictated a couple of sentences for him to write. He then read a story he wrote prior to the appointment from a picture prompt they sent. Then she asked him questions about the story. She had him insert punctuation into the story. For math, he did some addition, put numbers in order from smallest to largest, tell what number comes before or after another number,name shapes, did some simple word problems, skip counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s, talk about a picture graph, tell time.

Next, a pediatrician came to give him the remainder of the evaluation. She did a brief physical, and then had him do various tasks such as name all the objects he could think of from a certain set (timed), count to 10, say the alphabet, days of the week, and months, count backwards, say odd numbers, etc. Then she did tasks that involved picture identification, categorization, following directions, read story and asked him questions, said sentence with complex grammar and asked him who/what questions, visual memory, mazes, design copying and matching, memory for digits forward and reversed, etc. Some of the subtests were from a cognitive battery (could not see which one) and at least one of the visual tasks was from the K-BIT.

These were the only two evaluators. There were no speech-language, OT, psychologists, or other specialists on the team. That sort of surprised me. What I will say is that this evaluation is very broad and might be appropriate as a first step for people who have not had other evaluations locally. But one would still need to follow-up with other evaluations with the proper professionals, as this basically screened a broad variety of areas as opposed to doing an in depth evaluation.

So when we returned after lunch for the conference, first the learning specialist (former regular ed. teacher) reported on his strengths and weaknesses. She and the pediatrician consulted during our lunchtime. This was written on one side of a piece of paper. At the top the child’s strengths (assets) were listed: higher order cognition, receptive language, expressive language, sequential ordering, procedural memory, and social cognition. There were no scores, just those words listed. She went through those and said a sentence or two about each thing and really emphasized what a great job he did, etc. It was very encouraging and what I think Levine is known for. (We did not see him).

In the middle of the page were the weaknesses: paired associate memory (which affects decoding, spelling, and math facts), grapho-motor function (writing), spatial output, some aspects of attention (mental energy, work quality).

Below that was “getting started”, which was a list of suggestions which included books on tape, personal dictionary, read aloud directions/questions/word problems, continue reading tutoring, software to support decoding (Earobics), dictating writing assignments, use graphic organizers (Kidspiration), look/say/cover/write/check spelling strategy, increase sight words. She gave the mom several pages printed from the web for the things she mentioned like Earobics, Kidspiration, etc.
The pediatrician came in and discussed attention and sleep. They emphasized that a 7 year old should get 11 hours of sleep a night and that lack of sleep results in symptoms of poor attention. She talked about bedtime routine, etc. There was also some discussion about follow-up for the child’s articulation issues.

In a few weeks, the parents will receive a lengthy report containing the conclusions and recommendations…no scores, however. You cannot use this testing to prove LD eligibility, although it could be considered along with other information. In addition, a phone conference and further consultation is included in the fees up to a 3 hour maximum. Parents are encouraged to come back in the future for monitoring, if needed.

My thoughts while there were that I’d love to work there! Each educator/doctor team only evaluates one child a day. However, from the parents’ standpoint, I cannot think of much that was gained in regard to learning that we didn’t already know about this child. I could have given all of the educational recommendations (and had already given some of them.) The attention issue was not totally resolved…the doctor suggested a trial of no meds without telling the teacher to see what happens. He did not do any kind of continuous performance test for attention there.

Parents on LD Online and other listserves are accessing information that would allow them to hear about programs like Handwriting without Tears, Kidspiration, Earobics, etc. A basic psycho-educational eval and perhaps a speech-language or OT eval, if indicated, could get you about the same evaluation information.

So the bottom line for me is, while it was a great experience, I wouldn’t take my own child there, because I’d prefer to get more in depth testing in her specific areas of weakness. I feel that I already know her broad categories of strengths and weaknesses. I can see how it might shed some light into the needs of older students who are struggling and perhaps never qualified for special ed. It might help boost self-esteem for those kinds of kids. And if money is no object, then by all means consider it.

Janis