Learning Challenges Archives

What Is The Value Of A Neuropsychological Evaluation?

June 15, 2017 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

There are numerous reasons to consider having a comprehensive psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation completed, and the reasons may differ depending upon the age of the child being evaluated. A preschool child, for example, might be evaluated due to concerns about language acquisition, developmental disorders and/or Autism Spectrum Disorder, as well as concerns about behaviors at school or at home. Learning challenges often impact elementary school children and may include struggling with learning how to read, developing number sense, and managing multi-step or long term assignments. These challenges may be indications of a learning disorder, attentional issues, executive function challenges, or auditory processing disorder. Adolescents and teenagers may have additional challenges, such as performance anxiety, social-emotional issues, or managing transitions between school divisions or off to college as expectations increase. A comprehensive psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation can help to identify a child’s areas of strength and areas for growth. They also provide guideposts to develop a plan for addressing these areas to help ensure academic and social-emotional success and well-being.

Generally a psychoeducational evaluation is administered by a clinical psychologist, school psychologist, or neuropsychologist. A neuropsychological evaluation is administered by psychologists who have training in neuropsychology, which studies the interactions between behaviors, emotions, cognition, and brain function. However, neuropsychologists aren’t the only practitioners who administer neuropsychological tests, which can be confusing. Comprehensive test batteries can also be provided by experienced clinical psychologists, whereas school psychologists typically provide psychoeducational assessments. It’s necessary to seek out a neuropsychologist, specifically, if there is a more medically complex issue, such as traumatic brain injury, chronic illness, or seizures.

While there are distinct differences between a psychological assessment, a psychoeducational evaluation, and a neuropsychological evaluation, a comprehensive evaluation will cover the whole range of functions, which are customized to meet the needs of the individual, to answer the referral questions, to offer an understanding about underlying cognitive functions and to provide targeted recommendations for support. As educators, we’re typically most focused on comprehensive evaluations that include:

An observation of the child and a clinical interview.
A review of school and medical records.
Administration of assessments, which may address:
- Verbal and nonverbal reasoning and problem solving skills
- Visual and verbal memory
- Executive functions (attention, working memory, planning, organization, etc.)
- Auditory and visual processing
- Visual-spatial functioning
- Academic achievement
- Language processing
- Sensory-motor skills
- Fine motor development
- Social skills
- Emotional and personality development

The administration and interpretation of these subtests, along with input from other professionals, parents, and teachers, helps to guide the development of an action plan to address areas of weakness and concern while bolstering and enhancing areas of strength and interest.

Cognitive testing is almost always included in comprehensive psychoeducational and neuropsychological evaluations and more often than not, a Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V) is administered. The WISC-V is composed of five main areas, including subtests, which comprise the Full Scale IQ:

Verbal comprehension is the ability to use language for thinking and problem solving.
Visual spatial reasoning measures one’s ability to apply spatial reasoning and analyze visual details (synthesis of part-whole relationships, attentiveness to visual detail, and visual-motor integration).
Fluid reasoning measures the ability to obtain information from visual details, broad visual intelligence and conceptual thinking.
Working memory index is the ability to identify visual and auditory information, maintain it in short-term memory, and re-sequence it to be used to solve problems.
Processing speed index measures decision speed and graphomotor speed.

Academic achievement is assessed through the use of a variety of measures. Most often they will include at least one of the following if not more:

Woodcock Johnson Tests of Academic Achievement (WJ-III)
Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT)
Gray Oral (GORT) and Silent Reading Tests

The neuropsychological evaluations will also include measures of memory, visual-spatial and fine motor dexterity, language development, attention, executive function, adaptive functioning, and social-emotional well-being.

At My Learning Springboard we find quality psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluations incredibly valuable as a guide to tailor our recommendations for intervention, test preparation or school placement. Evaluations can often be overwhelming documents for parents or educational professionals who don’t regularly read and interpret them. To help our families get the full value of an evaluation, our team creates a summary document in a user-friendly format that highlights the salient points of the assessment with an emphasis on instructional implications and strategies. These documents support instructional planning and are often used by teachers, learning specialists, executive function coaches, and parents.

The importance of a high quality, comprehensive evaluation, administered by a neuropsychologist or a clinical psychologist with neuropsychological training cannot be understated if there are developmental, learning, language, social-emotional and/or behavioral concerns. These assessments will provide critical information about how the brain is working and insight about what’s going on and why. The data set and narrative interpretation will assist all professionals involved in a child’s learning to develop a targeted, individualized plan. They also help professionals and parents to better identify the appropriate learning environment and necessary supports for academic success. Because the planning for the testing battery and the interpretation of these assessments becomes the keystone for managing interventions, services, and accommodations, it’s worth investing in an excellent and highly qualified psychologist. Not all reports are created equally, even if they’re called a psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation, so it’s important for a parent to seek counsel in choosing an evaluator. We can help with these recommendations.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

Do You Know Where Your Child’s IEP Data Is?

May 1, 2017 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

It surprising in this environment of data-driven education that teachers are still sometimes surprised to find out when their students are doing poorly at the end of the term, or that many IEP goals remain with little progress made. How can that be? What are we doing with all this collected data?

Surprisingly, the answer is sometimes we aren’t doing anything. We give a quiz, get frustrated the student isn’t doing well. It doesn’t really change anything. At most, there are times when the information is reviewed, but in the same fashion it was already taught. If our students didn’t get it the first time we taught something, chances are we need to do more than repeat it, we need to research it using different methods and engaging different senses.

I have spent time working in strict ABA environments and if there is one thing an ABA therapist does it is collect data! What is amazing is how sometimes this data is collected and no changes are made when it shows weeks of stagnation! Whether you administer quizzes or have more informal checks, you are collecting data about your students’ learning but that is meaningless if you don’t use it to change your approach.

It might take more than a small change too. It is not always enough to just cover a topic again, change what is motivating learning, etc. You may actually need to try a play perspective, an approach that is multisensory or moving away from the table to the natural environment.

You also need to make sure you taught all the precursors first. Think about it, if you were trying to teach a student calculus right after Algebra 1, chances are your data would show failure over and over no matter what approaches you apply! If you skip important steps your student will need to go back. If your data is showing a consistent failure to have success with new material, it is important to consider if your student needs to go back before they go forward.

Finally, it is important to look at data from more than one source. Data can be taken wrong.

I worked with a student with a lot of aggression. We were supposed to record every instance of aggression, while trying to manage the behaviors, teach targets and record progress on those targets. Even though as a team we kept reporting that this was impossible, and that instances of aggression were being underrepresented, the case supervisor still felt aggression was decreasing and would site our faulty data to prove it. Of course speech and OT reported seeing aggression at the same levels and this should have been a red flag for everyone to check their data and perceptions.

We all want to make sure what we are doing is working. There are many ways to measure progress. One way is test scores. Another is to look at student output (like essays) over time (like a semester) and see how they improve in structure, topicality, specific ness, grammar etc. No matter how we collect our data, or what measure we are interested in, we need to assure the data is accurately and fairly collected and that we do something or make modifications based off the results. Since students need new approaches and methods NOW, not after they don’t succeed, we owe it to our data to put it to use and not just leaving it collected and lying in a drawer! Our data is as useful as we utilize it to be!

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Counseling Out With Compassion

March 5, 2017 Brad Hoffman 1 Comment

Counseling out is an unfortunate reality of private schooling. By design, private schools allow families to choose a particular school environment that adheres to certain standards or values and provides certain services, facilities, and curricula. The school community is carefully constructed and there are procedures in place to make swifter changes if the school feels a particular student or faculty member is no longer a good fit. That counseling out happens shouldn’t really be a surprise, yet families who find themselves in this situation are often completely shocked. If a family started at a particular school in kindergarten with the intention of staying through its entire program (however many grades that particular school may have), and then is asked to leave mid-program, it’s often devastating news. Generations of family members may have graduated from that school. A family’s entire social network may be connected to that school. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and often it’s not. Schools have so many tools and resources available to them for managing these situations and, if necessary, counseling out with compassion.

Students who are having learning difficulties don’t just suddenly start to have these challenges. Therefore, it’s critical to have clear grade-level standards for benchmarking a student’s skills and a system for communicating this information to parents. Many private schools prefer not to communicate reading levels, for example, because they fear parents will misuse the information. That could be true, but for struggling students, especially, it’s really important to be able to share with a parent what’s expected at a certain point in the school year relative to current levels of performance. If a child is working below grade level expectations, a clear intervention plan should be developed and documented for all stakeholders. Data comes in lots of forms so teachers should keep a portfolio of work samples, observational notes, standardized test scores, and informal assessments (i.e. running records, exit cards). This data becomes incredibly valuable in mitigating a family’s surprise if/when the school situation is no longer sustainable.

In a public school setting, there are certain expectations about designing and documenting systematic, evidence-based interventions, adhering to a transparent due process with parents, and providing the necessary resources for differentiated instruction. Private schools may take similar approaches, but they aren’t legally bound to them in most cases. Each private school establishes its own protocols for benchmarking, communicating data to parents, managing a response to intervention (RTI) process, and formally meeting with parents and outside professionals. Private schools can insist that a family provide certain supplemental resources in order for their child to continue in the program. Private schools can also terminate a student’s enrollment mid-year or not renew a student’s contract for the following year if they feel a child’s behavior or emotionality is too disruptive or the learning needs are beyond what they feel they have the resources to manage well.

Having a clear protocol in place for meeting with families and any private professionals involved in supporting the family is imperative. Educational problem solving is best done as a multidisciplinary team, so psychologists, psychiatrists, educational consultants, OTs, Speech and Language Therapists, and special education attorneys, among other professionals, are important allies. If everyone maintains a laser focus on helping the child to succeed, then a successful partnership can be easily established, and there may well be room for many manageable interventions. If the team is working collaboratively and clearly communicating with one another and the parents, then escalated problem solving can be handled compassionately and effectively. We’ve certainly had experiences where the entire team, parents included, agree that a placement is no longer in the child’s best interest and we work together to plan for a transition.

Unfortunately, there are just as many situations that do not unfold with this level of partnership, and for those families it’s a traumatic experience. These parents often experience all five stages of grief in a compressed time frame: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These situations can be messier yet if the relationship between the family and school has become combative, but there are best practices for managing this counseling out with compassion, too. First, schools should embrace outside professionals as allies in helping to successfully transition the student. Angry and defensive parents can often better hear the recommendations of private professionals. Second, schools should designate a point person for facilitating communication and admissions documentation. In some instances, having all communication facilitated by an educational consultant to avoid negative interactions between the parents and the school is most effective and pleasant for everyone. Third, schools should avoid micromanaging the next placement. If a family is being asked to leave, then a school should really facilitate rather than impose more control over the family’s situation, otherwise, families only become more distressed. Finally, schools should remain focused on the child’s needs, and advocate with efficacy.

Counseling out with compassion can be achieved if we start by planning for success. Educators and parents want to see their students succeeding, and they generally want to work in partnership. If something doesn’t seem quite right, it’s important that teachers, administrators and parents have courageous conversations in a timely manner. Interventions should be developed with transparency and an open mind so that we bolster a child’s success. If interventions aren’t working, we should learn from these experiences, and make appropriate adjustments. If too many adjustments are regularly needed, and it’s become clear that the environment is no longer the best fit, then a conversation about exploring other school environments is appropriate. While counseling out can be difficult topic to broach, it can also be an incredible turning point in a student’s school career.

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

On March 8, 2017, Brad Hoffman participated in a professional panel discussion with Dr. Evan Flamenbaum, Dr. Larry Hess, and Bonnie Spiro Schinagle, Esq. about educational, clinical, and legal considerations regarding counseling out. The event was designed for school professionals, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and pediatricians and took place at the West End Collegiate Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Developing Executive Function Skills Authentically

February 27, 2017 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Students trying to go from good to great in their school work will benefit from employing strong executive function skills. Developing these skills authentically happens over time and inherently includes behavior modification. Therefore, these skills, which include the ability to plan and organize time and work; the ability to initiate and complete a task; the ability to shift gears/sets depending on the situation; the ability to organize or impose order on work and play storage spaces; and the ability to self-monitor performance and attention are best taught in contextualized, meaningful, and authentic situations. There is no scripted curriculum. Developing executive function skills is all about developing situational intelligence and planning with the end in mind. Students need opportunities to develop lots of different strategies, much like tools in a toolbox, so that they can customize their approach, or “fix”, as each situation presents itself. Our most successful students ultimately demonstrate reflective, strategic thinking that develops along with a student’s increased metacognitve awareness. This work is facilitated by a skillful team with expertise in pedagogy, psychology and executive function coaching, and it progresses through modeling, guided instruction, and independent practice.

Our faculty at My Learning Springboard believes strongly in meeting students where they are and building on their strengths in order to develop or strengthen their executive function skills. It is this approach that puts our students ahead of the rest. Many students struggle for reasons that go beyond the content itself, which includes not being able to manage the meta-work of being a student. They struggle to maintain their train of thought when they don’t have their materials clearly organized and easily available and have to expend time and energy looking for them. Students are often technically aware they have a big test coming up on Thursday, but, while it seems too far away to begin studying on Monday, it looms as an unapproachable, discouraging impossibility on Wednesday night. These students could master their subject content if they could better master time management, work prioritization, their physical or digital workspace, and their ability to plan into the future and sub-task.

The goal of an executive function coach is to help students to identify inefficiencies or pitfalls in their strategic planning and to cooperatively develop and implement systems that mitigate these challenges. For example, a student who struggles with implementing quotations in his essays will be coached throughout the writing process on developing organizational skills, not only for him/herself, but for the essay as well. We might try keeping a quote journal for future reading so the process of analyzing quotes in writing can be both practiced and streamlined. Another student may need to schedule regular meetings with a teacher for support before, during or after school, but making that happen could be an overwhelming process. An executive function coach might cooperatively review the student’s calendar/schedule and help identify when the meetings could occur, as well as guide the student to respectfully initiate the request. We help our students develop their executive function skills by ‘seeing’ into the future and using that information to inform their current and future actions. And while many students are technologically savvy, they aren’t necessarily technologically strategic or digitally organized. Optimizing applications so that they’re assistive and identifying new technologies to facilitate effectiveness is often a huge part of our approach to executive function coaching.

Developing executive function skills authentically through strategic use of school work, extracurricular activities, and responsibilities at home is the best and most meaningful approach for students. Our goal is for strategic and timely practices to become internalized for each student, which happens over time. Once internalized, the student should be able to independently determine, for example, when teacher meetings are necessary, know how to budget time effectively and know how to attack the metacognitive challenges of learning. An executive function coach can help set clearly communicated expectations to both the student and his or her family as well as to form a culture of accountability over time.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

SAT Redesigned for Spring 2016

March 5, 2016 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The College Board redesigned the SAT in March 2016. Below is the complete explanation from the College Board about the changes.

The Basics

The redesigned SAT will first be given in spring 2016.
The SAT will be offered in print and, at selected locations, on computer.
There will be three sections: Evidence-Based Reading and Writing, Math, and the Essay.
The length of the SAT will be about three hours, with an added 50 minutes for the essay. Precise timing will be finalized after further research.
The exam will once again be scored on a 400- to 1600-point scale. The Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section and the Math section will each be scored on a 200- to 800-point scale. Scores for the Essay will be reported separately.

Eight Key Changes

The redesigned SAT will ask students to apply a deep understanding of the few things shown by current research to matter most for college readiness and success. They’ll find questions modeled on the work of the best classroom teachers and perform tasks practiced in rigorous course work. The SAT redesign is centered on eight key changes.

Relevant Words in Context

The redesigned SAT will focus on relevant words, the meanings of which depend on how they’re used. Students will be asked to interpret the meaning of words based on the context of the passage in which they appear. This is demanding but rewarding work. These are words that students will use throughout their lives — in high school, college, and beyond.

Requiring students to master relevant vocabulary will change the way they prepare for the exam. No longer will students use flashcards to memorize obscure words, only to forget them the minute they put their test pencils down. The redesigned SAT will engage students in close reading and honor the best work of the classroom.

Command of Evidence

When students take the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section of the redesigned SAT, they’ll be asked to demonstrate their ability to interpret, synthesize, and use evidence found in a wide range of sources. These include informational graphics and multiparagraph passages excerpted from literature and literary nonfiction; texts in the humanities, science, history, and social studies; and career-related sources.

For every passage students read, there will be at least one question asking them to select a quote from the text that best supports the answer they have chosen in response to the preceding question. Some passages will be paired with informational graphics, and students will be asked to integrate the information conveyed through each in order to find the best answer.

Questions that assess writing skills will also depend on a command of evidence. Students will be asked to analyze sequences of paragraphs to make sure they are correct, grammatically and substantively. In some questions, students will be asked to interpret graphics and edit the accompanying passages so that they accurately convey the information in the graphics.

The redesigned SAT will more closely reflect the real work of college and career, where a flexible command of evidence — whether found in text or graphic — is more important than ever.

Math Focused on Three Key Areas

The exam will focus in depth on three essential areas of math: Problem Solving and Data Analysis, the Heart of Algebra, and Passport to Advanced Math. Problem Solving and Data Analysis is about being quantitatively literate. It includes using ratios, percentages, and proportional reasoning to solve problems in science, social science, and career contexts. The Heart of Algebra focuses on the mastery of linear equations and systems, which helps students develop key powers of abstraction. Passport to Advanced Math focuses on the student’s familiarity with more complex equations and the manipulation they require.

Current research shows that these areas most contribute to readiness for college and career training. They’re used disproportionately in a wide range of majors and careers. The SAT will sample from additional topics in math, but keep a strong focus on these three.

Problems Grounded in Real-World Contexts

Throughout the redesigned SAT, students will engage with questions grounded in the real world, questions directly related to the work performed in college and career.

In the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section, reading questions will include literature and literary nonfiction, but also feature charts, graphs, and passages like the ones students are likely to encounter in science, social science, and other majors and careers. Students will be asked to do more than correct errors; they’ll edit and revise to improve texts from the humanities, history, social science, and career contexts.

The Math section will feature multistep applications to solve problems in science, social science, career scenarios, and other real-life contexts. Students will be presented with a scenario and then asked several questions about it. This allows students to dig into a situation and think about it, then model it mathematically.

Analysis in Science and in Social Studies

When students take the redesigned SAT, they will be asked to apply their reading, writing, language, and math skills to answer questions in science, history, and social studies contexts. They will use these skills — in college, in their jobs, and in their lives — to make sense of recent discoveries, political developments, global events, and health and environmental issues.

Students will encounter challenging texts and informational graphics that pertain to issues and topics like these in the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section and the Math section. Questions will require them to read and comprehend texts, revise texts to be consistent with data presented in graphics, synthesize information presented through texts and graphics, and solve problems based in science and social science.

Founding Documents and Great Global Conversation

America’s founding documents — such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — are all rather short, but they have inspired a conversation that endures today. Every time students take the redesigned SAT, they will encounter an excerpt from one of the Founding Documents or a text from the ongoing Great Global Conversation about freedom, justice, and human dignity. In this way, we hope that the redesigned SAT will inspire deep engagement with texts that matter and reflect not only what is important for college and career, but what is important for citizenship here and around the world.

No Penalty for Wrong Answers

The redesigned SAT will remove the penalty for wrong answers. Students will earn points for the questions they answer correctly. This move to rights-only scoring encourages students to give the best answer they have to every problem.