There are over two dozen individually administered screening tools produced for the primary grades. Considering their subject matter and purpose, schools must decide which assessment best fits their needs. This article gives an overview of the screening tools and the kind of information they provide.
Student writing can be evaluated on five product factors: fluency, content, conventions, syntax, and vocabulary. Writing samples also should be assessed across a variety of purposes for writing to give a complete picture of a student’s writing performance across different text structures and genres. These simple classroom help in identifying strengths and weaknesses, planning instruction, evaluating instructional activities, giving feedback, monitoring performance, and reporting progress.
This article explains how to consider your child’s present levels of academic performance and use baseline data to develop goals and objectives for a individualized education program.
When a doctor develops a treatment plan for a sick child, the doctor uses objective data from diagnostic tests. Your child’s individualized education program is similar to a medical treatment plan, and you need objective tests to know that your child is acquiring reading, writing, and arithmetic skills.
Individualized education program (IEP) goals cannot be broad statements about what a child will accomplish. Goals that cannot be measured are non-goals. Learn how to help the IEP team devise specific, measurable, realistic goals.
This is a cautionary tale, not just for people who have no real idea of what a learning disability is and probably suspect the whole thing is an overindulgent scam, but also for any parent of a child struggling mightily through school.
Your child may be eligible for special services that will help him or her succeed as a reader. Find out basic information about special education and which children are eligible for receiving special education services.
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders presents age-related guidelines that can help you determine if your child’s speech and language skills are developing on schedule.
Hearing the difference between similar sounding words such as grow and glow is easy for most children, but not for all children. Children who unable to hear these differences will be confused when these words appear in context, and their comprehension skills will suffer dramatically.
Because early intervention is so important, children who require special services need to be assessed at a young age. Here are six stages in the assessment process, from child-find to program evaulation.
Learn how school psychologists can partner with reading specialists and classroom teachers to evaluate the benefits of early intervention reading programs in their districts.
Progress monitoring can give you and your child’s teacher information that can help your child learn more and learn faster, and help you make better decisions about the type of instruction that will work best with your child.
For young children who have struggled socially or academically during preschool, transition to kindergarten needs careful planning and attention. See four suggestions for parents of children who may need extra help making a successful move to kindergarten.
How can school leaders support school-wide reading initiatives? Here are keys to leading the way in the areas of reading curriculum, instruction, assessment, and motivation.
Parents and teachers as well as other professionals are required by law to be involved in writing a student’s IEP. Find out about the members of an IEP team and the roles they play.
Parent-teacher conferences are a great opportunity for families to sit down one-on-one with your child’s teacher and talk about school progress. Here are some tips to make the most of this time.
School psychologists working in districts that use Response to Intervention (RTI) can offer expertise at many levels, from system-wide program design to specific assessment and intervention efforts with individual students.
The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student’s reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.
Learn what reading fluency is, why it is critical to make sure that students have sufficient fluency, how we should assess fluency, and how to best provide practice and support for all students.
Not only must schools teach academic skills, but they must measure how successful each child is acquiring these skills. One way to do this is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), which uses brief, timed tests made up of academic material taken from the child’s school curriculum.
Does your child need to be evaluated for a learning disability? Learn how to find the best professional, prepare for evaluation, and get the most information from the experience.
