Tips for good assessment and report writing – 8 and 9

These are the eighth and the ninth tip written by the assessment  team at the Jerusalem municipality educational psychology services.   The members of the team are:  Rita   Baumgarten, Hanna Brimer, Nadine Caplan , Eynat  Cohen Rahman , Etti Daniel Simon , Uri Dar ,  Michelle Lisses Topaz, Betty Netzer, Ruth Oman Shaked , Adina Sacknovitz , Smadar Sapir Yogev, Anan Srour   and  Dahlia Zayit.

For the purpose of learning disability diagnosis – go through the definition steps.

Ask yourselves:

Does the child have significantly poor achievement in reading decoding/reading comprehension/writing/written expression/math computations/math reasoning? 

Is one of the child's cognitive abilities significantly below average?

Can this poor cognitive ability explain the difficulties the child has with reading/writing/math? 

Are most of the child's cognitive abilities within average limits?

Are  exclusionary factors (for instance, emotional difficulties/lack of learning/inappropriate instruction) better explanations for the child's difficulties?  

Only if you answer "yes" to all those questions, you can diagnose the child as learning disabled.

Remember:

1. Not every difficulty in reading/writing/math is caused by learning disability. 

2. Even a very significant difficulty in a cognitive ability is not necessarily an indication of learning disability.

Pay attention to the child's emotional-personality characteristics and to the interaction between them and the child's cognitive characteristics.

Cognitive difficulties have emotional – personality ramifications, and sometimes also emotional – personality origins.  Emotional – personality difficulties have cognitive ramifications and sometimes also cognitive origins.  Try to delve into these reciprocal influences, since sometimes they are the key to understanding   the child's world and to constructing a meaningful intervention for the child.