I subscribe to a listserv sponsored by the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP). Earlier this month there was a short exchange under the subject line "Educational Evaluations." The discussion looked at problems with a test, the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-II), commonly used today to measure academic achievement and help determine whether a child has a learning disability.
IDEA 2004 (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act) Section 612(4) says "Upon completion of the administration of assessments and other evaluation measures--
`(A) the determination of whether the child is a child with a disability as defined in section 602(3) and the educational needs of the child shall be made by a team of qualified professionals and the parent..."(emphasis added).
In my state we call that group of people the Eligibility Committee. And while there are rules about what makes a child eligible for services under IDEA (and the committee has to live within those rules), there is a lot of latitude given to local school districts and the team as to which specific tests to use and how exactly to measure a child's problem.
The discussion began when David, a New York school psychologists who holds a doctorate in the field, said this: "What we have been finding is that children who score in the average range (on the WIAT-II) are not performing in the average range in class... some subtests like pseudoword decoding are notorious for giving away good scores to young children." David went on to say that the problem extended to subtests on math and writing and that students who scored in the normal range often continued to "bomb" in class.
The team has to look at a child's cognitive abilities (what most laymen would call I.Q.) to determine the child's potential, and then compare that potential to actual performance. If the child has average (or better) potential but is performing well below average, that discrepancy between potential and performance is the current definition of a learning disability.
The team, according to IDEA, looks at the evaluations that have been done on the child. When a child is failing in class and the WIAT-II says its abilities are in the normal range, the team has to decide what it thinks about that. David (our school psychologists who started the discussion) said that in team meetings he finds himself with the "need to explain away standardized test score in place of often informal classroom data" in order to state the obvious - that Johnny has a disability whether the WIAT-II shows a discrepancy between potential and performance or not.
David's question, ultimately, was whether anyone could suggest a better test. No one did.
As the discussion progressed, Ron (a certified school psychologist with a Ph.D. in Pennsylvania) made the point that curriculum based measures (CBM) collected as the sorts of informal classroom data David talks about can't really be used to measure whether a child is normal - only whether the child is meeting expectations or not. CBM's have become important in recent years as education tries to raise the expectations placed on most students. Ron's point (I took to be, at least) was the informal classroom data measures whether the child is meeting expectations against the demands of a specific curriculum while the WIAT-II measures how one child's abilities compare to another's - something else entirely.
Cathy (a Ph.D. from New Hampshire) piped in to describe a situation where a fourth grade student had no problem with the Kauffman Test of Education Achievement (KTEA-II) but failed most unit tests for the school Everyday Math curriculum (which is also used at the school where I teach). So the WIAT-II is not the only test that evaluators are having problems with. Cathy said that the team agreed to use those unit tests as the measure of performance - throwing out the KTEA-II score as they considered the child's eligibility under IDEA.
The last comment in the discussion came from Ron, an Ed.D who directs a university level program in school psychology. He asked a very simple question. If the child Cathy mentioned moves to a district where expectations are lower and suddenly is able to meet those expectations, is his learning disability "cured?"
The definition the term "learning disability" remains legally slippery, murky. How it should be measured and how useful current norm-referenced models for test are both seem to be highlighted by this discussion. And a large part of the problem appears to be differences from district to district. As a teacher working in a one of the poorest parts of Appalachia, in a county where 25% of the adult population is at level one literacy or lower (which means they can't read the newspaper or find their town on a map), I understand...
In Ron's words: "I sure hope the cure (or the cause) for LD doesn't become a family moving from one district to another."
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