Educational Diagnosticians

Dr. Thea Woodruff headed the Building RTI Capacity project and one of the developers of the Reading Academies.  She describes all the challenges she has experienced in trying to bring progress monitoring through CBMs and other measures to the schools.  She also describes the success stories of some schools who did use the information she taught.  She tells us where to find the RTI resources that she helped to compiled, helps us define RTI, the importance of the role of core instruction, and how data should be used to guide instruction.

To have RTi means to have progress monitoring using CBMs and evidence based interventions available for all students. However, most Texas schools lack the kind of RTi practices that were originally intended for school improvement and to prevent specific learning disabilities.  What has been happening in Texas regarding the status of RTi? Nazzie Pater-Rov does a search and review of the TEA website and other resources for RTI guidance and resources for RTI practices.

Executive functions play a big role in our ability to attend, empathize, and initiate action to make a change.  Join us as we talk with George McCloskey, Ph. D, who has plans to travel around to various Muslim countries. 

RTi plays an important role in determining the difference between students who are just EL and students who are both EL and have SLD.  Dr. Eric Haas and Dr. Julie Esparza Brown have researched and written about the administrative and instructional techniques that are needed to ensure good evaluation practices for EL students who may also be EL. 

Dr. Julie Alonzo is a pioneer of design for Curriculum Based Measures. CBMs were designed to get the best results with the most conservative use of resources. These quick tests not only give us an idea of where a child is performing, but also provide us with a way to track progress over time. 

Dr. Cherry Lee developed the Dysgraphia Informal Writing Assessment tool while working at TEA.  She tells us how we can use this tool to not only to help us diagnose dysgraphia, but also to track progress.

What have we learned about the neuropsychology of reading disorders? What are the early signs? How do we test for dyslexia? What interventions should we consider?

When recommending interventions, there are gimmicks and there are real solutions.  The federal government tells us that we have to use evidence-based interventions.  ESSA gives us guidelines for understanding the quality of research outcomes for various intervention programs. The What Works Clearinghouse provides a great searchable sight to sort through what the research says.  

The unconventional student has cultural experiences that create very different results for an area we traditionally thought was an innate construct of our cognition.  Carl Romstad tells us how our assessments prove this wrong and helps us to consider what these subtests really tell us about a child's cognition. He explains how he is trying to find more reliable ways to assess a child's Fluid Reasoning, even among the most culturally diverse populations.

Dr. Milton Dehn talks to us about the role of Executive Functioning in our Evaluations.