Assessment & Evaluation

Featured FAQs

Figuring out the problem is the first step to finding a solution, but the assessment process can be difficult! These questions will point you in the right direction.

Click below for answers to the following assessment questions:

Question 1: How do I set up an IEP for my child with ADHD?

Question 2: I think my child may have a learning disability but I'm not sure how to describe to the school exactly what I want assessed.What should I do?

Question 3: My child's school says that my child is very bright, but they want to hold him back because of his poor reading skills. I want him tested for a reading disability. What should I do?

Question 4: How can I find a professional who can diagnose a student's learning disability?

Question 5: My child was tested in kindergarten for dyslexia but they didn't find anything. What should I do now that he is in 3rd grade and still struggling with reading and writing?

Question 6: My son is far behind in school both academically and developmentally. Should he stay back a grade?

Question 7: If a child has been identified as having a learning disability and is currently receiving special education for reading, math, writing, and language development, how should this be placed within a school wide reading framework? Specifically, should this c

Question 8: How long should an intervention be tried with little or no progress? Also, should two interventions be tried at the same time if both are beneficial and the student is progressing? Isn't the whole point progress?

Question 9: I am a reading specialist and I teach in an elementary school. We began a 3-tier model of support last year. My question is about assessment. What assessments are the best cocktail for progress monitoring and benchmark assessment? We use DIBELS and CORE.

Question 10: I've started using new media tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in my classroom to differentiate instruction, and have recently begun to explore the use of virtual worlds and social networking with my kids. They seem to really enjoy using technology, and I'm seei

Question 11: Our reports cards require that we give students a grade for achievement and effort in each subject area. I like this configuration because some of my kids work hard, and I can reward them through their effort grade. But some of my colleagues are arguing f

Question 12: Do individuals with dyslexia show different MRI brain images when reading? If so, could MRIs be used to diagnose individuals with dyslexia?

Question 13: My 11-year-old daughter was tested for dyslexia but was not diagnosed as being dyslexic. However, her ability to decode unfamiliar words, effectively use blending, and reading speed continue to be below her grade level and peers. What tests can we have a

Question:

How do I set up an IEP for my child with ADHD?

Answer:

All parents should start in the school's front office. Ask to speak with an administrator and bring any type of documentation and work samples you may have. In order for an individual to receive any type of accommodations, the individual must provide documentation of a specific disability. For a valid and accurate diagnosis, an individual needs a full psycho-educational evaluation through a licensed or otherwise qualified professional. Ask the school for this type of screening/evaluation.

Note: A diagnosis of ADHD is not enough to qualify a child as learning disabled. In cases where students receive services for an ADHD diagnosis, either through an IEP or a 504 Plan, the coding is usually Other Health Impaired (OHI). The following articles from LD OnLine relate to diagnosis of ADHD and might be useful to you.

Finally, you may wish to contact any of the following organizations who specialize in advocacy and legal rights of parents:

Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) COPAA is an independent, nonprofit organization of attorneys, advocates and parents established to improve the quality and quantity of legal assistance for parents of children with disabilities.
National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) NDRN is the nonprofit membership organization for the federally mandated Protection and Advocacy (P&A) Systems and Client Assistance Programs (CAP) for individuals with disabilities.

Question:

I think my child may have a learning disability but I'm not sure how to describe to the school exactly what I want assessed.What should I do?

Answer:

If it is hard to verbalize your concerns, bring your child's work samples with you to the school to show what is hard to articulate. A full psycho-educational assessment should provide you with more complete answers.

Before going elsewhere, you might want to find out exactly what services the school system could offer you and when. If the time-frame or suggestions for providing needed services are unacceptable to you, there are independent educational testers that you can go to privately. The following articles will give you an idea of what to expect from the testing process:

There are several national organizations that can help you through this process and provide referrals to local professionals. You can contact the International Dyslexia Association or the Learning Disabilities Association. LD Online has a Yellow Pages service, Wrightslaw Special Education Law and Advocacy has a useful nationwide search tool. Use it to locate psychologists, educational diagnosticians, consultants, therapists, tutors, and advocates in your area. Browse their comprehensive directory of parent training and information centers for more resources, or to find educational consultants and advocates to help you through the process locally.

You can also contact the Parent Educational Advocacy Resource Center in your state, or look in your local phone book for “educational testing” or “psycho-educational testing” for someone close to you.

Be a good consumer in this process. Ask potential testers, tutors, and consultants about their experiences and specialization before you choose a provider. You want to make sure that the person you choose is a good match for your child.

Question:

My child's school says that my child is very bright, but they want to hold him back because of his poor reading skills. I want him tested for a reading disability. What should I do?

Answer:

Because your child is bright yet still struggles with reading, it can be challenging to offer the right support. You can refer to the following articles to see the characteristics that some children with learning disabilities exhibit:

If you recognize your child's reading struggles in these articles, voice these specific concerns to professionals at his school and request that your child receive an educational evaluation. This evaluation is free and within your legal rights as a parent to request. This article will give you an overview of the evaluation process:

Basics for Parents: Your Child's Evaluation

The article below has suggestions on how to be your child's most effective and informed advocate for his educational needs:

Advocacy in Action: You Can Advocate for Your Child!

Whether or not he is found eligible for special services, the evaluation will help determine your child's academic strengths and weaknesses and how he best learns. This should guide you in supporting your child academically and emotionally in the years to come.

Because your child is bright, he may currently be able to compensate for his learning difficulties. But as he gets older and the reading material in school gets more challenging, it may become increasingly difficult to compensate, and he may fall further behind as a result. But the earlier the cause of his reading weaknesses is determined and addressed, the better chance your child has of truly reaching his academic potential.

Question:

How can I find a professional who can diagnose a student's learning disability?

Answer:

First, find out from a school administrator exactly what services the school system can offer and when they could provide them. Express your concerns and find out the procedures involved in going through a screening process for your child. If the timeframe or suggestions are unacceptable, there are independent educational testers that you can go to privately. The following articles might be helpful to you:

There are several national organizations that can help families through this process and give local professional referrals. They might also have information about financial assistance for testing. You might want to contact:

Wrightslaw Special Education Law and Advocacy has a useful nationwide search tool. Use it to locate professionals in your area. You can also contact the Parent Educational Advocacy Resource Center in your state for more options.

In addition, you can look in your local phone book for educational testing or psycho-educational testing for someone in your area. LD OnLine also has a Yellow Pages service that might be helpful. Search by state for organizations, or find a parent advocacy group near you.

Be sure to ask potential testers, tutors, and consultants about their experiences and specializations before choosing a provider.A full psycho-educational assessment provides information about the way a student learns and how to best meet that student's needs.

Question:

My child was tested in kindergarten for dyslexia but they didn't find anything. What should I do now that he is in 3rd grade and still struggling with reading and writing?

Answer:

It is often challenging to detect learning difficulties in very young children. When your child was tested in kindergarten, he may have been able to compensate for his learning challenges to the point where there was little discrepancy between his ability and achievement. In order to be diagnosed with a learning disability and receive special education services, a child must exhibit both a processing deficit and a discrepancy between what he is capable of doing and what he is actually achieving in school.

As your child gets older, it may become increasingly difficult for him to compensate, and the gap between his ability and potential achievement may widen. If your child does have a learning disability, it will be easier to detect now than when he was in kindergarten. The following articles describe characteristics common to children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Look through them to see if you recognize any of your childs challenges in these descriptions:

If you see some of these characteristics in your child, you may want to request that his school give him an educational evaluation. It is within your rights as a parent to request a free evaluation and to have a vote throughout the evaluation process.

The educational evaluation will help you and the school better understand your childs academic strengths and weaknesses and how he learns best. The following articles will give you a clearer understanding of the evaluation process:

Basics for Parents: Your Childs Evaluation

Please be sure to share any of the interventions that you have been trying at home and the concerns you have. The following articles may give you some insight as to how you can make the most of the local screening meeting and subsequent meetings in this process:

Your willingness to help your child at home will go a long way in giving him academic and emotional support, as well as the comfort of knowing that he is not alone in his struggles. The articles below suggest ways you and your child can work together at home:

Remember that you are the strongest and most knowledgeable advocate for your son, so trust your instincts and dont give up! The sooner your son receives the assistance he needs and the quicker you and his teachers work together to develop a plan for home and school, the closer he will be to fully realizing his academic potential.

Question:

My son is far behind in school both academically and developmentally. Should he stay back a grade?

Answer:

Your question about retention at grade level is a challenging one. Most of the research done on the subject points to damaging social effects as well as a lack of long term academic improvement for most children. That said, given the way most schools are currently structured, moving students on to higher grades who are lacking skills and knowledge is also unlikely to ensure academic success. The following article may help you understand the challenges involved in that decision process and proposed strategies to overcome the issue.

Beyond Social Promotion and Retention Five Strategies to Help Students Succeed

If your school is one in which 1) at-risk students are given intensified learning experiences; 2) differentiated instruction is provided; 3) teachers are continually improving their skills; 4) lessons are geared to ongoing performance assessments; and 5) very young students receive the help they need early and often you can safely support promotion for your child. If you are not convinced that your child will get the support he needs to succeed in the next grade, you may want to strongly support his retention. In addition to academic factors, it is important to weigh the child's age, size, emotional maturity and physical development when considering retention. Also examine the program that will be offered it should be a new, challenging experience not a repeat of the same lessons and texts.

Question:

If a child has been identified as having a learning disability and is currently receiving special education for reading, math, writing, and language development, how should this be placed within a school wide reading framework? Specifically, should this c

Answer:

We have research to indicate that when a student is performing below the level of the reading instruction being delivered in the general education program, the classroom program has little effect on the target student. Instead, tutoring accounts for the student's growth. Therefore, when classroom instruction is not aligned to the skill level of the target student, I don't think it's necessary for the student to be in the classroom for reading instruction. It's better to maximize time in tutoring. (If, on the other hand, classroom instruction can be aligned to the student's needs in meaningful ways, there is evidence, at least in math, to suggest that the student benefits from participating both in the general education program as well as tutoring. Even then, however, the tutoring program accounts for the greater amount of progress.) A student's ongoing progress monitoring (i.e., weekly or biweekly assessment) should be conducted at instruction level, not grade-appropriate material. For benchmarking (i.e., 3-4 times per year), measurement should occur at both levels.

Question:

How long should an intervention be tried with little or no progress? Also, should two interventions be tried at the same time if both are beneficial and the student is progressing? Isn't the whole point progress?

Answer:

Based on our research and others' research, we recommend 10-20 weeks of a validated tutoring program. We don't generally recommend two programs at the same time because (a) due to costs, reduces the number of students who can be tutored successfully and (b) it's possible that the two tutoring programs use different sequences/methods, which may be counterproductive.

Question:

I am a reading specialist and I teach in an elementary school. We began a 3-tier model of support last year. My question is about assessment. What assessments are the best cocktail for progress monitoring and benchmark assessment? We use DIBELS and CORE.

Answer:

The Center on Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (formerly the National Center on Response to Intervention) provides technical information on progress monitoring and screening assessments.

Question:

I've started using new media tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in my classroom to differentiate instruction, and have recently begun to explore the use of virtual worlds and social networking with my kids. They seem to really enjoy using technology, and I'm seei

Answer:

Technology and media skills have increasingly been recognized as a necessary component of education for today's students. As more and more teachers integrate 21st century skills, new media, and web 2.0 tools into their classrooms, the challenge of assessing these skills has become a hot topic among educators. In looking for ways to assess your students' learning with technology tools, start with the groups that are at the forefront of determining technology standards and practice: the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Both organizations have written extensively on what children must know to be productive members of a technological society. Both groups have also produced guidance on assessing technology skills. A number of teachers have used these materials to create their own rubrics and ideas for assessing student blogs, Twitter use, or wiki creation. Digital Age Assessments lists a variety of rubric suggestions; the forums in Classroom 2.0 can also be an excellent place to confer with other teachers about how they assess their students' work with technology.

Question:

Our reports cards require that we give students a grade for achievement and effort in each subject area. I like this configuration because some of my kids work hard, and I can reward them through their effort grade. But some of my colleagues are arguing f

Answer:

I would retain the effort grade, for two reasons. First, it's useful feedback for the child and for parents. There is good evidence that determination, and perseverance are hugely important to many school outcomes that most people care about. And as described in the book, there is also evidence that students' beliefs about effort are important. When students believe that effort leads to achievement, they are more likely to work hard, and not to get discouraged by failure, because they believe that, with more effort, they might succeed. If, in contrast, they believe effort doesn't matter much and what really counts is ability, then failure is very discouraging because it indicates that they lack ability, and there is nothing that they can do about it.

A second reason to retain the effort grade is that it can provide useful feedback for teachers. If the two grades for a given child are very dissimilar, that seems important to me. The child who is getting high grades in achievement and low grades in effort would seem to need more challenging work. The child showing the opposite pattern needs less challenging work.

I'd like to know why your colleagues want the effort grade eliminated. My hunch is that they don't want kids to get the message that achievement doesn't matter much and all that matters is trying hard. I'm sympathetic to that. Perhaps there is a way that effort can be acknowledged and praised, without diminishing the importance of reaching goals. The relative importance of grades should be explicit and can also be signaled visually on a report card by the size and positioning of the grades.

Question:

Do individuals with dyslexia show different MRI brain images when reading? If so, could MRIs be used to diagnose individuals with dyslexia?

Answer:

Extraordinary progress in imaging technology now allow scientists to image a child's brain as he or she is actually reading. The technology, referred to as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, uses the same scanner as a typical MRI used to scan, for example, your knee if you have a torn ligament. The difference is that the fMRI uses special software and some adaptive hardware as well so that small changes in blood flow to different parts of the brain can be detected as a child reads. Using this technology, our research group (and others) has learned that there are three systems for reading on the left side of the brain, one in the front and two in the back of the brain.

We have also learned that in struggling readers, there appears to be less activation or a glitch in the two systems in the back of the brain. Our studies have also indicated what happens in the brain in children who compensated, to some degree, for their reading problems, and also identified the specific region called the "word form area" located in the back of the left of the brain that seems to be related to skilled or fluent reading.

Most excitedly, our recent studies, supported by the results of other investigators as well, demonstrate that the brain is highly malleable and under the influence of effective reading instruction — can change and resemble that of a good reader. Basically, this means that teaching matters — making it all the more important to ensure that each child receives reading instruction that has been proven to wor — referred to as "evidence-based" reading instruction. Parents, teachers and we as a nation, should settle for no less. For anyone interested in more information and brain images, I refer you to chapters 6 & 7 of Overcoming Dyslexia. Similarly, the notion of evidence-based education is discussed in detail in my book.

At this time, the use of functional imaging, fMRI, is limited to research. Clincial judgments about reading and reading disability are made on the basis of a child's history, observations of how he or she reads and test results. To be explicit, MRI's or any other imaging modality, is not currently recommended for use in the diagnosis of a reading problem.

— Dr. Sally Shaywitz

Question:

My 11-year-old daughter was tested for dyslexia but was not diagnosed as being dyslexic. However, her ability to decode unfamiliar words, effectively use blending, and reading speed continue to be below her grade level and peers. What tests can we have a

Answer:

Very often bright children are penalized and fall between the cracks; that is, although they do not learn the necessary strategies for reading, they are able to memorize enough words to avoid detection. Your daughter appears to fit into this category. The problem is that as your daughter progresses in school, she will be faced with many, many more new words, many long, technical or unfamiliar words and with many rare words — the bottom line is that memory no longer is adequate to know all of these words.

Your daughter should be tested. In my book, Overcoming Dyslexia, I describe in some detail the types of testing and rationale for testing. Basically, her ability to read words accurately and fluently and to comprehend words are essential components of a test battery. You should ensure that her fluency — ability to read rapidly as well as accurately — are tested (this is often overlooked). Tests of her ability to get to the sounds of spoken words are also important as are measures of her vocabulary. This could serve as the core of a test battery, other tests can be added, depending on her individual history and pattern.

She should be tested. If on the basis of her testing, in addition to her history and observations of how she reads aloud, she is not a fluent reader, she should get help soon. She can be helped and the help should not be delayed.

You should also keep in mind that your daughter may be helped by the accommodation of extra time if she is a slow reader.

— Dr. Sally Shaywitz