Monitoring Progress on 504 in reading

pepperidge

New Member
HI,

I am still struggling with my son's youngest son's 504. (I took a few weeks out of the battle to have surgery to get a benign polyp removed, everything is ok). He is "at risk" because of his Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE)/Learning Disability (LD)/BiPolar (BP) but is generally performing right now about where he should be. He risks falling off as the Exec functioning demands increase. I think for the moment that we have lost the IEP battle, but the school appears to be taking things pretty seriously. So I think for the moment we will focus on getting what we want rather than on an IEP per se and see how the school year goes. We generally have a good relationhshiop with the SD and know his teacher quite well who is very good.

He has some reading issues (mostly higher order comprehension and inference issues) as his reading is on grade level and he met the state benchmark last year. I want them to agree, as you all suggested, to retest him using a normed test instrument sometime in the winter just to make sure he is making progress. When he had his neuro psychiatric testing done H=he scored in the WJ III Passage comprehension 69 percentile and in reading fluency in the 34 percentile. Would these be the best tests to repeat?

They have put in the title 1 reading program (he though technically he doesn't qualify) where he is in a very small group reading program during his class' free reading time three days a week(which he wasn't utilizing effectively anyway). The teacher is working a lot with him on reading fluency using one of the programs the neuropsychologist recommended. So we think that is a real plus.

I could imagine the school saying that we have grades on his report card, the 4th grade state benchmark test in reading coming up, the exercises they do in the Title 1 program so why does he need to repeat the more formal testing. For me the answer would be that we want the most objective nationally normed benchmark to make sure he is not falling behind (age wise) where he was last spring when we had the neuropsychologist testing done. These tests are the only ones that can provide that info and let us see whether our interventions are keeping him on track.

However, my concern is whether the WJ III is the best instrument--are there others?

We are also arguing for some kind of summer school/special tutoring so that he doesn't regress during the summer. Any thoughts on how to make this case?

Thanks again for all your help.

Chris
 

Sheila

Moderator
There are numerous normed test instruments for reading diagnostics. WJ III is highly recognized. Whether it is the best diagnostic to use for a particular individual is not a question I can answer.

Is difficult child's Learning Disability (LD) in reading?

Within WJ III, there are several reading subtests. You've only mentioned two. Are these the only ones that were performed?

See http://www.wrightslaw.com/advoc/articles/tests_measurements.html#table1 for conversion chart and other test measument information.

Argument for using the same test instrument: Every test instrument is different. In order to compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges, the same test instrument must be used. Your school district is aware of this.

Examples: WJ III compared to scores from a WJ II would not necessarily be an accurate comparison; the same with WISC IV compared to WISC III; Stanford-Binet 5 to Stanford-Binet 4th Edition; and so on.
 
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