Maybe We Work Too Hard Because What We Are Doing is Not Working?

The new team of Diagnostician Clubhouse reporters, Candace Vielma, Candace James, and Valencia Ashley join Nazzie to share various tidbits of information that is on their minds. Dr. Schultz joins to comment as well. Candace Vielma: Talks about a court case that found the school district liable when a dyslexia program was not implemented with fidelity. Candace James: Gives us a new diag tip for converting PDFs to word documents. Valencia Ashley: Tells us about the upcoming IDA conference. Nazzie Pater-Rov: Shares a review of the Sattler book.

Nazzie presents 3 sources that attempt to describe what constitutes Evidence Based Assessment. Amy Smith and Becky Robinson join in to comment. The 3 sources are: 1. Psycho-educational Assessment and Report Writing by Stefan Dombrowski. 2. Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems by (Vaughn & Fletcher, Winter 2020-2021) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OUiZywTZkTS38OgRItggARaxE1XmWXf8/view?usp=drive_link 3. Evidence-Based Assessment of Learning Disabilities in Children and Adolescents (Fletcher et al., 2005) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z2djJn__14zeR3Ayy8iSaDbfcZ4UqkDE/view

Amy Smith, Candace Vielma, Lori Melton, and Zarvonia Gibbs pitch in to add commentary to Nazzie's summary of the FAQs of the the dyslexia handbook.

Texas yet again is starting the school year off with changes to the operating guidelines. The new moderators and Amy Smith, Region 10 representative charged with diagnostician continuing education, joins to talk about the changes. There's so much to talk about, that we are dividing it into two parts.

Dr. Julian Elliott joins to tell us about his new book: The Dyslexia Debate Revisited, co-authored with Elena Grigorenko from the University of Houston, this book gives a summary of the research in dyslexia and proposes that we use the term dyslexia to describe a persistent problem in basic reading skills rather than as a medical diagnosis.

Dr. Nancy Nelson leads the National Center on Improving Literacy to support states and districts to provide the information that leads to evidence-based practices and policies for improving literacy. Check out their website with this link. She and Nazzie talk about assessment for dyslexia, the prevalence of dyslexia, and how the role of the diagnostician is challenged by changes in the way we think about dyslexia.

Joe Torgesen and Richard Wagner, authors of the CTOPP II describe the challenges related to direct assessment of dyslexia and their proposal for using statistics to evaluate risk. Dr. Torgesen shared an article that summarizes the LD summit of 2001 that is mentioned in the discussion. Dr. Wagner also shared an article about the Constellation Model.

Nazzie provides a summary of the book: Identification of Learning Disabilities from Research to Practice, edited by Bradley, Danielson, and Hallahan (2001), which is a compilation of 9 white papers that resulted from the LD Summit of 2001 and led to the reauthorization of IDEA in 2004. She also shares a summary of email conversations with Jim Walsh regarding WBFWR (Way Behind For Whatever Reason), in an attempt to understand the context of his reference to that initialism.

Dr. Steve Elliott is one of the authors of the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS). Check out free resources on his website: https://ssiscolab.com/. He also shares that https://developingchild.harvard.edu/ describes the impact of stress for young children. Elizabeth Shanley also joins to tell us about free training resources from Pearson related to the SSIS. Use this link to get to one of those presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fujeO-QhMOA.

For how long do students need to be exposed to tier 1 instruction before an assessment is appropriate? What tools can we use to test children in kindergarten? What should we be looking for in our evaluations? These are all hard questions that diagnosticians on Clubhouse attempt to answer.