Educational Diagnosticians

Some current professors and professors in training join to discuss features of various conferences for educational diagnosticians and dyslexia therapists. Some of the conferences discussed are TEDA, HuMat, the CLD, and the IDA.

Dr. Branton Shearer utilizes the Howard Gardner's theory of intelligence to help educators help students find their strengths. Helping children find their strengths is a great way to add a special touch to our FIEs and hack deficit thinking. As long as we are focused on deficits, that's all we will see. Everyone has something the world needs, and families are depending on us to help the world see how children with disabilities can add to our society once we help them identify and build their strengths. His test, the MIDAS, is not a personality test or a learning style test. It has much more utility and validity that those types of measures. For more information, see this website: https://miresearch.org/

Dr. Dombrowski joins to tell us about the low achievement model for identifying SLD and the criticisms he has for PSW methods. Here are some links to articles he has written: 1) A Systematic Review of the PSW Diagnostic Accuracy Evidence: Is it Time to Abandon PSW? 2) After the Demise of the Discrepancy: Proposed Learning Disabilities Diagnostic Criteria 3) Beyond the Rhetoric of Evidence Based Assessment: A Framework for Critical Thinking and Clinical Practice

The new team of Diagnostician Clubhouse reporters, Candace Vielma, Candace James, and Valencia Ashley join Nazzie to share various tidbits of information that is on their minds. Dr. Schultz joins to comment as well. Candace Vielma: Talks about a court case that found the school district liable when a dyslexia program was not implemented with fidelity. Candace James: Gives us a new diag tip for converting PDFs to word documents. Valencia Ashley: Tells us about the upcoming IDA conference. Nazzie Pater-Rov: Shares a review of the Sattler book.

Nazzie presents 3 sources that attempt to describe what constitutes Evidence Based Assessment. Amy Smith and Becky Robinson join in to comment. The 3 sources are: 1. Psycho-educational Assessment and Report Writing by Stefan Dombrowski. 2. Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems by (Vaughn & Fletcher, Winter 2020-2021) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OUiZywTZkTS38OgRItggARaxE1XmWXf8/view?usp=drive_link 3. Evidence-Based Assessment of Learning Disabilities in Children and Adolescents (Fletcher et al., 2005) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z2djJn__14zeR3Ayy8iSaDbfcZ4UqkDE/view

Amy Smith, Candace Vielma, Lori Melton, and Zarvonia Gibbs pitch in to add commentary to Nazzie's summary of the FAQs of the the dyslexia handbook.

Texas yet again is starting the school year off with changes to the operating guidelines. The new moderators and Amy Smith, Region 10 representative charged with diagnostician continuing education, joins to talk about the changes. There's so much to talk about, that we are dividing it into two parts.

Dr. Julian Elliott joins to tell us about his new book: The Dyslexia Debate Revisited, co-authored with Elena Grigorenko from the University of Houston, this book gives a summary of the research in dyslexia and proposes that we use the term dyslexia to describe a persistent problem in basic reading skills rather than as a medical diagnosis.

Dr. Nancy Nelson from the National Center on Improving Literacy discusses dyslexia assessment, prevalence, and the evolving role of diagnosticians in addressing dyslexia challenges. Topics include state policies on dyslexia, inclusivity in dyslexia identification, special education support, and the importance of training evaluators for dyslexia identification in schools.

Joe Torgesen and Richard Wagner, authors of the CTOPP II describe the challenges related to direct assessment of dyslexia and their proposal for using statistics to evaluate risk. Dr. Torgesen shared an article that summarizes the LD summit of 2001 that is mentioned in the discussion. Dr. Wagner also shared an article about the Constellation Model.