Most school psychologists, spend most days of most weeks of the year assessing children. This year I've assessed over 140 students in some manner, and in most cases an intelligence test was administered. This is mandated assessment, and when I say mandated, we're not talking about re-evaluations that occur every three years, or whether or how to choose a battery to diagnose learning disabilities; it is mandated, in that our district uses a discrepancy model to determine whether or not a student has a specific learning disability, and whether or not they qualify for special education services. If you are not familiar with the discrepancy model of learning disability diagnosis, here's a quick crash course: The idea is that your level of achievement should be predicted by your cognitive ability. The reason we know this, is that we've done significant amounts of research that shows if you have average ability, you generally have average achievement, above average ability above average achievement, below average ability, below average achievement, etc... When there is a significant difference between ability and achievement therefore, (e.g. you have average cognitive ability and below average achievement), this stands out. This gap between ability and achievement has been one of the hallmarks of diagnosing learning disabilities for over 40 years of school psychology practice. Those that have below average ability and achievement (low average, or slow learners), generally then don't get diagnosed with a learning disability, despite the fact that they often have significant learning deficits as well.
What has become clear however, is that knowledge of someone's cognitive ability does not have much of an impact on what we prescribe as treatment for learning problems. We know what works to remediate reading difficulties. If the reading difficulty is one of decoding or fluency, generally a scientifically based sequential reading decoding problem works to remediate this area of weakness. It generally doesn't solve all reading difficulties for a student, but we have scientific proof that these programs improve this area of deficit. If the problem is one of reading comprehension, we prescribe scientifically based reading comprehension programs that focus on predicting, inferencing, vocabulary development, describing text features such as identification of setting, attributes of characters, etc... These programs work regardless of what a student's cognitive ability is; we also have scientific proof of that. The question then becomes, if we know these things, for what purpose are we administering intelligence tests? Two answers are often postulated related to this question: 1) That we can learn about what abilities and strengths a child has other than a student’s deficits; and 2) If a child has a deficit in a specific area on a cognitive ability test (language, memory, visual processing etc.), we can develop plans to accommodate those weaknesses or even attempt to remediate them.
The answer to the first question generally does not hold much weight, in that, we can also learn a great deal about a child by simply interviewing the people that know them and looking at their performance in all aspects of their lives, both in and out of school. Good interviews and rating scales, and targeted assessments can get at a much more vast pool of strengths than a cognitive ability test, which is limited by how you define intelligence, and what is assessed. Thus, it is a waste of resources to spend that much time on a cognitive ability assessment, when we can use that time to examine a student in a much broader fashion using other methods. The answer to the second question is currently being investigated by research, but results have been mixed. There is evidence that if a student is poor at memory tasks, that we can develop good accommodation plans to help manage this weakness and work around it. There is very little strong scientific evidence that we can significantly improve our memory capacity, however. The evidence is not strong on improving visual/perceptual reasoning skills either, and there is no evidence related to how this impacts reading achievement in any way (although there may be some with impact on math/science achievement). There is good evidence, however, that we can remediate language weaknesses such as receptive and expressive language, verbal reasoning and vocabulary skills. Improvement in these areas can therefore improve performance on reading comprehension tasks later. However, there is also evidence that there are better ways to assess these skills directly other than through a cognitive ability test.
This is not to suggest that tests of cognitive ability hold no value. We know this not to be true, as they are the best predictors of achievement that we have on the market, and they are good long term predictors. Also, different cognitive ability tests do provide a profile of strengths and weaknesses that can be helpful to get to know a student's individualized abilities. What I am suggesting is that the amount of time we spend on administering these types of tests does not pay off in active increases in student achievement. We can use our resources in a better way. When we conduct assessments, we can get more information from comprehensive reading and math assessments, progress monitoring, structured observations, performance assessment, and interviews. As psychologists, we should be spending time on these things, rather than testing for the sake of testing, because of antiquated district policies or supposed legal requirements. If we really want to make a difference in student achievement, we should be asking better and more specific questions, closer to what a student actually does every day, and rely less on supposed inferences of the relation between cognitive abilities and achievement, with very weak ties to research support. The time is now to start addressing what it is we really are doing as school psychologists every day. In order for you to feel comfortable about your contributions to improving a student's achievement, where should you be spending a majority of your time?
No comments:
Post a Comment