Hi Katherine, I chose a big term, I don't know how this is broken down in your school into psych and IQ. 
What you want first of all is a descriptive assessment of reading skills--what our daughter can do as compared with a norming sample--3000 children (or however many) in the US. There are a variety of assessments which can do this. From this you get a profile of what your daughter can do. Oh--by the way--you should also get this from her teacher, a description of what your daughter can do, how the teacher sees her, the kinds of assignments she is given, where she is different from many of the other students. Who should do this? I am assuming that your school has someone in house who can do this. I would absolutely find other parents who have taken this route in school, and learn how the whole process has gone for them. You also need to find out from your daughter what she thinks is going on, why she is having difficulty, and precisely what she is having difficulty at doing. 


There are other reading assessments which will be more fine-grained, that is, they will be able to focus on specific reading areas or skills. I think there must be a process at your daughter's school for doing this. Again, check with other parents for their experiences. Also check the credentials and experience of the in-house assessor. 


If for some reason you are not satisfied, you should go outside and find an individual, a clinic, an organization, this does good assessing. If you want special services for your daughter the assessments should feed into this. 
I haven't looked into assessments for about a year, so I am really not up to date in all of this. 


I don't know what the teacher meant by saying the problem wasn't physical. The brain is physical; perhaps she meant that there was nothing obvious she could see from the outside. 


Anyway, this is where I would start. 


Andrea 




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt" <katherine.gotthardt at gmail.com> 
To: "The Learning Disabilities Discussion List" <learningdisabilities at nifl.gov> 
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 3:39:42 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: [LearningDisabilities 4256] Re: Brain research in education 

Not to be ignorant, Andrea, but what is a specialist in reading assessments? Is that different than an in-school LD assessment or a psych and IQ assessment? 


On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:55 PM, < andreawilder at comcast.net > wrote: 




The MRI is a type of brain scan. How does the teacher know it isn't physical? And what does "physical" mean in this context? Not much. I would want to take my daughter to a specialist in reading assessments. 


Andrea 




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt" < katherine.gotthardt at gmail.com > 
To: "The Learning Disabilities Discussion List" < learningdisabilities at nifl.gov > 
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 1:27:27 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: [LearningDisabilities 4247] Re: Brain research in education 

I just went to my daughter's parent/teacher conference yesterday, and once again, was disturbed about her reading level. She stayed back in Kindergarten and is now a fifth grader. Her reading and comprehension skills are between 2nd and 3rd grade, even with summer school and extra help over the summer. I asked the teacher if she thought I should take my daughter to have a second MRI to make sure nothing is wrong. The teacher didn't seem to think it was anything physical and assured me if she did think it was physical, she would have told me long ago. 

Can someone explain how a brain scan is different from an MRI? 


On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Nora Chahbazi < ooprc at comcast.net > wrote: 




I just received a brochure for a conference titled 'Smarter Brains: Using Brain Rearch to Raise IQ and Achievement' at the 25th Learning and the Brain Conference in Sanfrisco in Feb, 2001. Some of the workshop titles are" Neurointelligence and Education: Is it Time to Require Students to have a Brain Scan?" and 'What Neuroscience can teach us about Teaching' - along with many others. This is a perfect example of the feeling of confusion and frustration by those of us trying to teach reading or anything else! There has just been a disdcussion on this list about how neuroscience and education are not connected and then I am exposed to this conference that has 3 days of educating educators in the power of neuroscience in education. How does one choose who to believe? Maybe neuroscience in education is akin to snake oil, maybe it is the best thing since sliced bread. How would someone decipher the truth from 2 opposite camps proclaiming 'the truth'. I have found this phenomena to be a source of frustration throughout my journey of learning how to teach reading. Many research studies come to totally opposite conclusions about what is great and what is horrible amd damaging.(For example: Whole language is the answer! Phonics is the answer!......Teach them to memorize the words and the book to foster comprehension! They must have significant repetition/drill in phonemic awareness and phonics before ever reading a book!,.... Look at the picture to get meaning! Do not look at the picture; we don't read pictures! ..... Teach the phonics rules in order to read the words! Don't teach phonics rules because they are developmentally inappropriate and slow you down!..... You must learn the letter names to read! You do not use the letter names in reading!....and on an on) leaving the consumer to scratch their head and get mired in the confusion of all this conflicting information. Who does one believe? In the meantime, the numbers of poor/non readers of every age continue to eacalate. How do those on this list deal with this?! 
Thanks, 
Nora 



Nora Chahbazi, President 
EBLI Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction 
Ounce of Prevention Reading Center 
www.ebli.org 
810.732.4810 
fax 810.732.0366 

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Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt 
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-- 
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt 
Community Writer for NEWS AND MESSENGER 
www.insidenova.com 

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