Formal and Informal Assessment for Dyslexia Flashcards
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What is the primary purpose of a comprehensive psycho-educational evaluation for suspected dyslexia?
Answer: To identify a specific pattern of linguistic strengths and weaknesses characteristic of dyslexia.
A comprehensive evaluation is not just for a label, but to understand a student's specific cognitive and academic profile. It aims to identify a pattern of strengths, such as strong reasoning or vocabulary, alongside weaknesses in areas like phonological processing and word recognition, which is characteristic of dyslexia.
The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP-2) is a key tool in a dyslexia evaluation because it measures which core set of skills?
Answer: Phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatized naming.
The CTOPP-2 is specifically designed to assess the phonological abilities that are critical for reading. Its core subtests measure a student's ability to hear and manipulate sounds (phonological awareness), hold sounds in memory (phonological memory), and quickly name familiar items (rapid naming), all of which are often areas of weakness in dyslexia.
How does a norm-referenced assessment differ from a criterion-referenced assessment?
Answer: Norm-referenced tests compare a student to a peer group, while criterion-referenced tests measure mastery of specific skills.
Norm-referenced tests, like the WISC-V or GORT-5, compare a student's performance to that of a large, representative sample of same-age peers, resulting in scores like percentiles. Criterion-referenced tests, such as a spelling inventory of CVCe words, measure a student's performance against a fixed set of criteria or learning standards to determine what they know and can do.
An academic language therapist uses informal assessments, such as observing a student read a list of nonsense words, primarily to:
Answer: Guide daily instructional decisions and monitor progress on specific skills.
Informal assessments are crucial for the diagnostic and prescriptive nature of therapy. Observing a student's performance on a specific, targeted task allows the therapist to analyze error patterns in real-time and adjust the next steps in instruction to meet the student's immediate needs.
Which assessment profile is most indicative of the classic presentation of dyslexia?
Answer: Average verbal comprehension and reasoning with significantly low phonological processing and word reading scores.
The hallmark of dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading. This is often reflected in an assessment profile showing average to above-average cognitive abilities (like verbal comprehension) but significantly lower scores in phonological processing, word-level reading, and spelling.
A therapist wants to assess a student's orthographic mapping ability. Which task would be most effective?
Answer: Administering a timed nonsense word reading fluency test.
Orthographic mapping is the mental process of bonding letters and letter sequences to spoken sounds. Reading nonsense words (e.g., 'vib', 'detch') is a direct way to assess this because the student cannot rely on sight memory and must use their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to decode the unfamiliar word.