I’ve been teaching Special Ed. in the public school system for 30 yrs., 11 years as a teacher of the hearing impaired and the rest in a cross-categorical resource room. I’ve been asked by an acquaintance to do an IEE to find out if there are specific deficits in reading comprehension. I have never done an assessment outside the school system. I have a couple of questions:
1. How much is a typical fee to charge in a suburban town in the northeast U.S.? Do I charge a price for the whole assessment or by the hour?
2. I was planning to use the GORT-4 and perhaps the WJ-III (if it hasn’t been done recently). Any other good suggestions?
I’d really appreciate some suggestions.
Marilyn
Re: IEE--How much to charge
Marilyn,
I am trying to do some private evals, particularly reading evals, and I price testing as a package: the test session, the written report, and a parent conference to explain the results.
We are in the southeast, so I’m sure your prices could be higher than mine. My full eval consists of Woodcock Reading Mastery, CTOPP, TOWRE, GORT-4, Test of Written Spelling, OWLS Listening Comprehension, and some informal measures such as code knowledge. This package is $275 unless the child has recent educational testing (WJ-III) in which case I give a $50 discount. Lindamood-Bell tests pretty much the same areas for about $575.
Private testing firms in a nearby large city charge $13.50 per subtest of the WJ-III. So the standard battery is about $135- $150.
I don’t have any overhead other than the purchase price of the tests, so I try to keep my fees reasonable. We live in an area where the cost of living is not so high.
(Listening comprehension is good to check when looking at reading comprehension. If the listening comp. is strong, it’s probably vocabulary, decoding, or fluency holding back the comprehension. I’m sure you know that, but that’s why I include the OWLS Listening Comp subtest)
Janis
Northeast US is on the high end in prices for everything. From our informal surveys here previously I’d say *minimum* of $50 for one hour, often much more than that, $100 or more; for a multi-hour evaluation, the going market rate seems to be at least a couple of hundred dollars and often into the thousands.
You may want to keep your price down either because you are not in that great need of money or you want to help someone who doesn’t have much, but don’t give your work and expertise away for nothing, because that is how it will be valued.