Hello everyone and welcome to the What in the World is Dyscalculia podcast.
I am your host, Dr. Honora Wall and the podcast is sponsored by Educalc Learning.
You can visit educalclearning.com for lots of information, training, free resources,
and access to ask questions about Dyscalculia, the math learning disability, and other things
related to mathematical struggles.
I also encourage you to stop by www.thedtri.org and check out the Dyscalculia Training and
Research Institute and see what kind of things we've got going on over there.
Lots of free resources through our non-profit arm as well.
And today in the podcast, this is really going to be the first of many shows about this topic.
I want to talk a little bit about trends in the evaluation process and that school screening
process.
It's a complex topic and got some guests lined up for future shows.
Some psychologists who can help speak directly to the issue of training required to administer
a true evaluation that can screen for different learning disabilities among other issues.
Now this is very complex in depth which is why I'm not going to try to squish it all into
one episode but I want to give you some highlights of trends that concern me at this time.
So let's start at the beginning.
Why would a person need an evaluation?
What is an evaluation?
What am I even talking about?
Well when we notice that children are struggling in school more than we think they should based
on their intellectual abilities, then we say well it looks like there might be a problem
here and if there is a problem then we want to make sure they get the right resources,
interventions, and accommodations to be successful.
It's the learning equivalent of screening vision to see whether or not a person needs
to wear prescription glasses or maybe they just need readers or maybe they can see just
fine and there's something else we want to address.
Same thing happens with learning differences especially in students who are neurodivergent.
Science includes autism, ADHD, executive function issues, and the specific learning disorders,
dyscalculia, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia.
And the problem a lot of people run into across the country is that it's hard to get evaluated.
There are many reasons for that.
Sometimes school districts or school personnel at your local school aren't sure what the legal
requirements are.
They're pretty clear.
Federal law is pretty straightforward on this issue and has been for a very long time.
The idea act addresses the need for evaluations done by trained, qualified professionals.
Emphasis is important there and you can look more into that online if you have any questions
about the idea act.
Evaluations can be expensive.
Trained professionals are booked sometimes six or nine months out.
It can be hard to get an appointment.
Some districts have school psychologists and some do not.
And people have different levels of training and awareness.
This is all also very brand new.
Dyscalculia is a very complex evaluation piece for dyscalculia especially.
So there are a lot of adults and older students who have never been properly evaluated or
just in their 30s, 40s, 50s got an evaluation and realized they have dyscalculia.
So we have a lot of people with a lot of questions and a lot of concerns who are not getting
a lot of adequate appropriate help.
This is just something we are going to keep working on.
Awareness will change things.
Having more people enter the field of psychology or neurology so they can become trained to
administer evaluations.
That will help.
Those of course are long term solutions.
And everyone is looking for short term solutions because children are struggling right now
and we want to help them.
However, I am seeing a trend and I am doing a little more research to get my ducks in a
row and my vetted, qualified research, my documentation and facts together.
I don't want to spread any misinformation.
But I am hearing a lot of chatter that different states are using their education agencies
to help with the evaluation process for suspected learning disabilities.
And this is a huge red flag.
This is a real problem area that we need to address.
There are many ways that a school or an education agency can screen for suspected learning disabilities.
And there are a lot of things that go into a special education evaluation process at
the team based school level.
Those include lots of different pieces of documentation, lots of different evidence.
Questionnaires, parents, questionnaires with teachers, interviews between the student and
a special education director or a school supervisor or a school counselor sometimes.
And then an analysis of classroom assessments, performance on state testing, the difference
between how a student speaks in class and how they perform on a paper and pencil or
a computer based test.
All of these different things are taken into consideration to try to determine whether or
not we need to do further testing.
If we need further testing, this is where we want to be very careful with what kind of
testing students are getting and who is administering these tests.
The only way to truly know whether or not a student probably has a learning disability
is through a psychological or neuropsychological evaluation.
Even that can be iffy because not everyone is trained to read those things the same exact
way.
There is a lot of personal interpretation based on the part of the person administering
it.
I'll save those stories for a different podcast.
I would love for there to be more training on administering, interpreting and evaluating
for dyscalculia.
That is a big need in the world of psychology and neurology.
But that will be a talk for a different day.
The tests that are included in the true professional evaluation include a number of intelligence
tests, behavioral tests, cognitive tests and achievement tests.
You'll hear a lot of words about Woodcock Johnson or the Wexler test, WISC, Stanford
B'nai, there are a few different ones out there that are commonly used.
That gives us a baseline and overall look at abilities.
There are also a lot of very specific tests underneath that.
Woodcock Johnson test of achievement, wide range achievement test.
Tests with a lot of letters involved, C-C-P-T, Cort, CVL-T, ASDS and those will look for
things like attention, language, memory and learning, motor control, visual spatial, autism,
executive function, behavioral, reading, mathematical computation, mathematical understanding,
processing speed, fluid reasoning.
There's a lot that goes into determining whether or not a learning disability is present.
It's very important that these tests are administered and interpreted by a trained professional.
Let me talk for a quick minute about what is even involved in becoming a trained professional
who can administer and read these tests.
First of all, you've got to be a doctor.
You have to have already completed your doctoral degree in psychology or in neurology.
Second, you have to already be done with your year of supervised clinical experience.
Then, you have to already have licensure.
You have to already be certified to practice as a psychologist or neurologist.
After that, you can apply and you have to show that you have documented training and
knowledge in eight different knowledge areas.
You have to prove that you've already gone through your postdoc training.
You have to have a lot of documented hours.
Some programs, over 1,600 hours of clinical experience that has been supervised before
you can even get into being fully prepared and approved for being a trained psychologist
or neuropsychologist, getting your board certification, showing that you know how to properly do this
work.
There are some very important reasons for that.
One is that these tests are valid because they are standardized.
That means that to the best extent possible, every single person who takes this test anywhere
in the country is going to have the most exact experience, exactly the same as is humanly
possible.
A lot of the training is in how do you administer, how do you remove your own bias, how do you
not accidentally influence the test-taking experience?
Then you have to have a lot of training in interpreting and analyzing results.
You cannot hand someone the whisk and an answer key and have them just give it to a fifth
grader and then score it against the answer key and then decide whether or not a learning
disability is present.
Completely inappropriate, not valid, and dangerous, frankly, because we are muddying
the waters of test validity and we are not getting accurate information.
With all the information I have just given you, I can tell you I am not qualified to
administer or interpret any of these tests.
I am not a psychologist.
I am not a neurologist.
Not a neuropsychologist.
I do have my doctorate in education.
So I can speak to curriculum and instruction.
I can speak to educational research and I can speak to the experience of creating a bridge
between research, between evaluations, and the classroom experience or learning experience.
But I stay in my lane.
This is very important that states do not push education professionals out of their
lane and into the role of test administer or interpreter.
It is completely inappropriate.
It is not what we do.
That is not our field and it is not our training.
We have tons of training and we have a very important field and we have a very specific
lane to be in that is vitally important and should be recognized on its own grounds.
We should stop asking educators to ignore education and ignore their training and education
to do all of this other work that should be done by different professionals.
Not better but certainly different.
If you had a broken foot, you probably don't want to go to an ENT because they are eye,
ear, nose, and throat.
Not so much involved in fixing your broken foot.
We need to use the right people for the right situations.
This is something that some states are moving away from because they are pushing this kind
of work on to special education directors, area education agencies, different educational
groups that cover professional development training, not evaluation.
Of course, on the other hand, here is part of the problem.
Schools do have a different kind of evaluation process that they use.
We have the same word but it has very different meaning depending on the context.
A psychological or neuro-psychological evaluation is going to be very different.
That assessment is very different than what we mean when we talk about a school-based
evaluation process and school-based assessments.
The school evaluation process is going to include teacher recommendations, classroom observations,
test results, including both summative and formative.
It's going to include project assessments and the rubrics and whether or not children
met a rubric.
It's going to include parent observations.
It's an entirely different conversation than what happens through the first evaluation I
was talking about.
It's really important for parents to understand the difference between these two so that you
know whether or not your student is getting what they need and what they are supposed
to have.
It's really important for schools to understand these differences so that we are offering
the correct screening and evaluation process and that we are not leaving things to chance
and we are not putting testing on to people who are not appropriately trained to do it.
I think this is going to be a growing problem mostly because there simply aren't enough
people to administer evaluations in a timely fashion for all the people who have a need
for it.
We are already seeing that.
It's also a growing problem because I've talked with quite a few groups of people and we are
discussing how getting diagnosis and appropriate support for dyscalculia is really turning
into an affluent white situation.
If you have the money and you have the access then you are probably going to get the correct
evaluation and help a lot faster.
We already had a social justice component to this because we have such a large group
of people around 5 million K-12 students in the United States alone.
That doesn't even talk about the adults facing this issue or people in other countries but
a huge group of people who are not being properly recognized and served.
That is already a big problem.
If we start really seeing a separation based on socioeconomic conditions now we have an
even bigger problem.
Of course the way to address some problems is to try to get help right away and that's
why I think some places are turning too.
Any port in a storm let's just buy the booklet for this test, buy the scoring guide and answer
key and let someone just administer this test to this student so that we can move ahead.
The problem is that is not correct, that is not appropriate, we are not getting good data.
Then that means we are not going to get good services.
So I want you to make sure you know what is going on in your school district and when
someone says they are going to put your child or your student if you are the teacher or
the school administrator that you are going to be given an evaluation to determine eligibility.
I want you asking some questions exactly what is included in the evaluation, what kind of
assessments, what kind of evaluation, who is doing it.
What is their training and background, that is a perfectly valid question to ask.
You are not being rude if you say can I ask who is going to be administering and scoring
that test.
If the answer is well we have classroom assessments and they are going to be graded and interpreted
by the classroom teacher.
Fantastic, exactly that is who is supposed to do it.
We are also going to have some screeners and some things that will help us identify if
we think it is really an issue related to dyscalculia because we are looking at processing speed,
subatization, we are looking at computational skills and basic facts and to see whether
or not they hit an appropriate grade level and those sort of screeners can be given by
a wide variety of people.
Hopefully you are already using the free one that TouchMath put out because it is fantastic
but there are a lot of people who can administer something like that and make sure the screening
happens and interpret it.
Not a problem.
If they say well we are going to do an evaluation specifically looking for autism, ADHD, executive
function, learning disabilities, okay pause, that needs to be the school psychologist,
an outside psychologist or a neuropsychologist.
That is it, it is a very small group of people who are appropriately trained to create the
testing atmosphere, administer the test properly using given conditions, avoiding their own
bias or influencing the test and who know how to read the results and interpret.
It is not just oh you got this score and that puts you in this percentile, what does that
mean and what does it mean in the context of all of the other tests and the percentiles
that came back for these different areas.
So just make sure that you know, make sure you are asking those questions and if you
are not happy with the answers, know that you can request different evaluations and that
they are going to be administered by the appropriate people.
And if you are in a school or in a district, please make sure you are doing that as well
and let's make sure we are getting the right kind of data so that we can use it properly.
That is how we are going to get help for people who have dyscalculia or not.
Not everyone has dyscalculia, it is only about 8, maybe 10 percent of the population.
So some of these evaluations are going to come back as saying alright we see something but
it is not this.
That is fine, that is completely valid.
We need to make sure that we are not missing the 8 to 10 percent who have dyscalculia because
for those people they are never going to move forward and reach the success they are capable
of without the right support in place.
If you would like to know more about that support, if you would like to know more about
the evaluation process or you have other questions about dyscalculia, please reach out to me.
I am pretty easy to find.
You can email me at Honora at educalclearning.com.
Also you can email me Honora at thedtri.org.
You can find me on tiktok, instagram, youtube, check out either of the websites.
We have a support group page for teachers and that is a public page.
So lots of information that we try to give out for free as often as possible.
I am Dr. Honora Wall and I really appreciate you spending the time to listen to the What
in the World is Dyscalculia Podcast today.
I hope you got a lot of good information out of this one and we will revisit this topic
with other experts in the future so we can hear what they have to say.
Thanks for listening.