From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities, A Blog by
Dr. Gary G. Brannigan & Dr. Howard Margolis
Parents and school personnel often make a critical mistake. They assume that instruction and related factors do little or nothing to cause or sustain reading disabilities, that all reading problems lie within the struggling reader. Thus, reading and other educational evaluations that reflect this assumption stress five things: testing, testing, testing, testing, and testing. They minimize or ignore everything else. Read more...
Dyslexia, dyslexic, dyslexics, evaluation, evaluations, learning assessment, Learning Disabilities, learning disability, learning evaluation, reading assessment, Reading Disabilities, reading disability, reading evaluation, reading problem, reading problems, struggling reader, Struggling Readers, test, testing
It’s the end of the school year and your kindergartner or first grader is still struggling with reading. You think he has a reading disability. What should you do?
One of the first things to do is get an accurate, informed, and comprehensive reading evaluation. Without an evaluation, remediation is like doing surgery without x-rays or lab tests. This raises a critical question: How can I get the right evaluation?
You can pay for a private evaluation. This way, you can seek out a reading specialist with a good reputation who takes the time to listen to you and understand your concerns. As you might suspect, private evaluations can be very expensive, especially if the specialist has a doctorate in reading or a related area. Read more...
Dyslexia, dyslexic, Learning Disabilities, learning disability, learning evaluation, reading diagnosis, Reading Disabilities, reading disability, reading evaluation, reading problems, reading specialist, struggling reader
Recently, I reviewed the Gray Diagnostic Reading Battery-Second Edition for The Seventeenth Mental Measurements Yearbook. In the Gray’s manual was a wonderful quote that’s so important, it’s worth memorizing: “Too often examiners forget the dictum that ‘tests don’t diagnose, people do’ and base their diagnoses exclusively on test results, a hazardous enterprise at best. Test results are merely observations, not diagnoses. They specify a performance level at a given time under a particular situation, but they do not tell the examiner why a person performs as he or she did.” Read more...
Dyslexia, dyslexic, dyslexics, evaluation, frustration level, Learning Disabilities, learning disability, learning evaluation, Monitoring, monitoring of reading, Reading Disabilities, reading disability, reading evaluation, reading levels, Reading Materials, reading problem, reading problems, reading remediation, reading specialist, reading tests, remedial reading, remediation, standardized testing, standardized tests, struggling reader, Struggling Readers, test, testing, tests
