Uschi shares the results from Corin’s educational psychologist report, undertaken after 200 lessons of Easyread:
“We saw an educational psychologist on Monday who started her assessment with Corin. She did an hour with him on all sorts of general maths, reading, spelling and vocabulary tests. Lovely lady and Corin was quite happy to do that. Especially, cause they started off with maths, as he said that was his strongest subject, so he was happy to show what he could do.
I got the report today and it pretty much confirmed what we would have thought.
This is what it said in terms of current attainment:
Current Attainment:
Attainments in Literacy: The following tests are to be considered:
Reading
Untimed test of graded single word reading, in this case the Wide Range Achievement Test 4 (blue test form) was used. The word reading subtest is made up of two sections – letter reading and word reading, it is a recognition test.
Corin read confidently and audibly when he recognised the word easily. He demonstrated excellent blending skills and used his phonetic knowledge to decode unfamiliar words successfully. His standardised score was 106 placing him in the mid-average range.
Sentence Comprehension measures an individual’s ability to gain meaning from words and to comprehend ideas and information in sentences using a modified cloze technique.
Corin read the sentences with some fluency. At times he approximated words and ‘read’ what he thought they said often then re-reading to be more accurate, this seemed to mean that occasionally he lost the flow and some of the meaning of what he was reading. His comprehension standardised score was 104, again mid-average range.
Spelling
Untimed test of graded single word spelling, in this case the Wide Range Achievement Test 4 (blue test form) was used. The spelling subtest is made up of two sections – letter writing (13 dictated letters) and also name writing, and dictated spellings of single words. The scoring in this subtest relies on the letters being clearly recognisable – undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s are permitted however letter reversals are not.
Corin could spell simple, phonetically correct, words and the more common exception words (e.g. should). Those words that he did not spell correctly had some common errors e.g. syllables missing, spelling rules not followed but some phonetical awareness.
Corin’s standardised score was 90, placing him in mid – average range for spelling.
The standard score difference between this and word reading and more particularly mathematics computation is worthy of note being statistically significant and could suggest a specific difficulty.
I’m particularly pleased that he really showed his excellent decoding skills, because that’s definitely the achievement of Easyread, no doubt about it. The fact that he’s up to a mid-average level in reading is testament that this programme has really helped him enormously.
I’ll spare you the full maths assessment, but in the test used, he came out in the high-average group – again, pretty much where I would have expected him to be.
So, the psychologist suggested that she could delve a little deeper into the area of spelling difficulty to see if there are specific things we could do to help Corin with this. It will probably always be hard for Corin, but I still think that if we know where the issue is as precisely as possible, then we can help the most. And the fact that he is now reading with more ease and therefore generally reading more will surely also help his spelling in the long run.
Right, that’s probably a long enough message for now 🙂 But I think it really gives some backing to the success of the programme – I know there wasn’t a formal comparable assessment beforehand, but I know he wouldn’t have scored this highly in the reading.”