Reading Disabilities – Private Practice Diagnosis

Transcript

Here in my private practice and in many other private practices, it’s a little bit longer and more thorough. So we essentially do the same thing. We take in a developmental history. We get all the background. We make sure that we are ruling out all the other areas of possible problems that might account for why a child is not learning to read as expected. Then when they come into the office, usually depending on the age, it could be a three hour evaluation. It could be a five-hour evaluation. I like to look at children across a school day because that’s really how they’re asked to be functioning in the schools as well. So we’ll look at their overall capacity for learning their ability in verbal language. Do they understand the language? Do they understand synonyms, antonyms? Do they have a vocabulary that’s broad enough in order to learn to read. And then we look at their nonverbal ability, their fluid reasoning, can they form concepts and ideas? So that’s kind of that higher level of thinking. Then the other parts that are often measured in IQ testing or conceptual testing is what we call working memory. Do they have the capacity for hearing something and remembering it, but also thinking about it while they’re remembering it and then processing speed. Are they able to process information with the same efficiency as other peers? So all of those pieces together help us determine the child’s overall capacity for learning.