Katherine:
Unless your pediatrician has indicated some health problem there is
never any need for an MRI or any other brain scan to diagnose and plan
remediation for a possible reading disability. Is your daughter
receiving special education services? You may request an evaluation form
the school district. If you attend private school, but live in a public
school district, you may request an evaluation from the public school
where your daughter would attend. 
 
Andrea is correct about the urgent need to know what reading skills your
daughter already has, and which ones she still needs to acquire. Do not
delay. That she has stalled out at the 2-3 grade level is very typical.
Students with reading disabilities can often attain this level, but
pushing beyond this level is very difficult without a more intensive and
systematic intervention, which is almost never available in a general
education setting.
 
All evaluations are not created equal. You need information about your
daughter's phonemic awareness skills, letter/sound association
knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency, reading comprehension,
and her receptive and expressive language skills. There are cognitive
processing skills that are strongly associated with reading acquisition
that should also be measured (auditory/phonological processing, verbal
working memory, executive attention, long term retrieval fluency, etc.)
The evaluation might include the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Cognitive
Abilities (WJ Cog III), the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test III
(WIAT-III), the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP),
and the Gray Oral Reading Test IV (GORT IV). Ask specifically for the
skills and processes to be measured and ask if the tests the evaluator
has selected will yield scores in those areas.
 
All intervention teachers are not created equal. Even if you get a
proper evaluation, the next step is to plan an appropriate intervention.
The plan must include measurable goals (i.e. today she can read this
many words correct in 1 minute from a second grade level text, with this
percentage of words read correctly. Next month she needs to be reading
more words correctly). Don't settle with vague goals such as "Will be
able to read grade level text for comprehension." That is a nice goal,
but it is hard to measure, and if you can't measure the progress the
chances of wasting time are high. She needs to learn more than her peers
in order to get caught up. You must always keep in mind whether or not
she is catching up. If not, the intervention needs to be changed
somehow. Your daughter should be able to catch up in her ability to read
words and her ability to comprehend (unless she has a rare low-incidence
problem such autism, and this is very unlikely. If she had an obvious
disorder such as that she likely would have been diagnosed long ago).
However, it is likely that she will always be a slow reader. That is ok
if you can normalize her ability to read words accurately, and to her
ability to comprehend what she reads.
 
Your daughter likely needs help restoring her self-confidence. This is
critical. She needs to work harder than her peers in order to get caught
up. She will need a lot of motivation and self-confidence in order to
sustain the level of effort needed. 
 
Self educate! You need to be an expert advocate for your daughter. A
good place to start is with the FREE publication form the National
Institute for Literacy, A Child Becomes a Reader: Proven Ideas from
Research for Parents, Kindergarten through grade 3. This can be
downloaded for FREE at www.nifl.gov <http://www.nifl.gov/>  , or you can
call 800-228-8813 and have a free copy mailed to you. This is a great
publication! You should read the whole pub, but focus on the second
grade section for ideas about what you should do at home, and what to
look for at her school. There are many other good titles available for
free. 
 
Hope that helps.
 
 
 
Brant Hayenga
Educational Diagnostician 
Stapleton Elementary/Rio Rancho Middle School
(505) 896-0667 ext. 226 (District Office)
(505) 891-8473 ext. 519 (Stapleton Elementary)
bhayenga at rrps.net
 
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