To make sense the process of assessing someone for a learning disability in reading, it is important to understand the different goals of testing. You might want to be tested simply to find out if there is a disability present. You might want to know the specifics of how that disability is impacting the ability to read. You might want to see if you (or someone else) are eligible for special services or accommodations in school. What tests are done and how the outcome is interpreted will differ based on what the goal of testing is and who is doing it.
Another way to think about this is that deciding whether a disability exists is a completely different question from what, if anything, needs to be done about it. A private psychologist may look at a set of data and say that a child has a learning disability in reading. A school could look at the same data and say that the child does not qualify for special education because, while reading achievement may be relatively weak, it is still within the broadly normal range and so the child does not need specially designed instruction to be successful.
The two most basic things that are assessed when testing for dyslexia are intelligence (IQ) and reading achievement (grade level). Until quite recently, the federal government defined a learning disability (for the purposes of educational law) as a significant discrepancy between intelligence and achievement. In other words, if someone’s reading skills were significantly lower than you would expect given how smart they were, they were considered to have a learning disability. As we will see below, there are lots of problems with this definition, but how smart someone is overall and how well they read are certainly important pieces of information to have.
Some of the most common IQ tests used for kids are the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children and the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities. There are a number of standardized achievement tests as well, including one’s by Kaufman and Woodcock-Johnson. It’s important to recognize that achievement tests are normed using kids from all over the country, so what is considered “on grade level” may actually be higher or lower than what your school expects. In addition to reading, writing and spelling are usually assessed at the same time because they are so closely related.
Some reading problems actually turn out to be speech or language problems in disguise. It is also not uncommon for someone to have both speech or language problems and a learning disability. For this reason, it’s common for people to be assessed for speech and language issues at the same time as for a reading disability.
Two of the most common speech and language issues that affect reading are language processing and phonological processing. Language processing has to do with your ability to take in words and understand their meaning. People who have trouble with language processing may seem like they’re not paying attention in school, because when everyone else is following directions they don’t know what to do. They heard the words, but they couldn’t process them properly or quickly enough. This can interfere with reading comprehension. People with language processing problems may be able to figure out what words are on a page quite easily, but not understand what they mean.
Phonological processing is the ability to hear and distinguish sounds in speech and to associate letters with those sounds. People with deficits in phonological processing have trouble breaking words down into sounds and putting sounds together to make words. This makes decoding written words very difficult.
Someone with a learning disability has a relative weakness in one or more areas of thinking affecting the ability to read. Having a relative weakness, however, automatically means that there are relative strengths. To figure out if someone has a learning disability in reading, the team doing the assessment will look at a variety of tests, school reports and other pieces of information to see if this pattern of strengths and weaknesses has existed over time and has been consistent.
It’s easier to understand this if we think about a concrete example. Let’s consider two kids, A and B. Both are in second grade, and both are behind in reading. In fact, their achievement scores are identical. Kid A has always been a stellar student, even in preschool. Kid A was reading before Kindergarten and did well in reading in first grade. However, in second grade Kid A completely stopped making progress in all academic areas.
Kid B, on the other hand, was always a late bloomer. Kid B did not learn the alphabet until Kindergarten and only got all of the letter sounds towards the end of first grade. Kid B loves to build things and can build elaborate, intricate structures out of blocks. Kid B’s preschool teacher remembers that, as much as story-time was a challenge for Kid B, playing with blocks was always a favorite.
It is much more likely that Kid B has a learning disability in reading. We can see several years in which one area of thinking (building and special relations) was strong and another (pre-reading and reading skills) was weak. Kid A, on the other hand, had a bunch of strengths until recently, and now suddenly has a bunch of weaknesses. Whatever is going on with Kid A is unlikely to be a learning disability.
A good evaluation for a learning disability will consider whether the child has gotten good instruction in reading up to this point and at whether solid interventions have been tried. You cannot say that a kid has a learning disability in reading if no one ever tried to teach them to read, or if their reading teachers were all terrible. It’s also important to consider whether the teaching that has occurred is not just generally of good quality but of good quality for the needs of this particular child. If a whole racial, ethnic or gender group is doing poorly while another is doing well, that’s a red flag that the teaching has not been appropriate for the lower performing group.
Some kids just need an extra boost to get going in reading. Once someone works with them more intensively for a while, they will get the hang of it and do fine. These children do not have a learning disability. When evaluating someone for a learning disability, it’s important to consider whether people have tried to give the child that boost and whether and how much it worked.
Before you can say someone has a learning disability, there are some things that need to be ruled out. The assessment team should consider whether the child has normal vision and hearing, an emotional problem or mental illness, a conduct disorder, a brain injury, a disorder on the autism spectrum, or a global cognitive impairment.
When all the testing and data collection are done, the evaluation report can be very long and very hard to understand. Make sure you ask lots of questions about anything you find confusing.
One common area of confusion has to do with the results of IQ and achievement testing. There are often multiple numbers reported for each test.
The raw score is how many points the person scored on the test. This is not the most helpful number, because you have nothing to compare it to.
The scaled score tells you how the person compares to average. Both IQ and standardized achievement tests usually have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. This means that roughly 68% of people will score between 85 and 115, and this range is considered “broadly normal.” About 95% of people will score between 70 and 130.
The percentile rank tells you how many people (usually of the same age and gender) out of every 100 tested score worse than the person being evaluated. In other words, 75th percentile means that 75% of people do not do as well as the person being tested.
The grade equivalent tells you what grade a typical person getting this score on the test is in. A grade equivalent of 3:2 means that the average person in the second month of third grade would score the same as the person being tested.
Each test may have multiple sections, each with their own score. These subtests are important because it allows you to see just exactly where the person is doing well and where they are struggling. This can help with seeing a pattern of strengths and weaknesses, and can also give clues as to what type of thinking is getting in the way of reading.