Questions about developmental testing.

April 15, 2012

Hello!

Just wanted to know if any of you have had any experience with the Batelle

Developmental Inventory Scale - my son is being evaluated for continuing

services. He has been getting services from early intervention since he was

very young, but now that he is turning 3, he is graduating out and being

trasferred to our local 3-5 year old program. He went in for an evaluation day,

where he was tested under the BDIS for his social/personal skills and also

cognitive skills. He scored a 79 for his the social domain and there was no

mention of what that score meant. There was only a vague " mild developmental

delay " comment. I know that usually with a lot of standardized tests, there is

usually a mention of percentile rank, confidence interval or age equivalent

scores. I don't know what to make of that score. I was also concerned that he

scored " average " on his cognitive skills, since one of the domains tested was

his attention skills and as far as I and all of his therapists and his teachers

are concerned, he has major attention issues. In fact, he has a 1:1 in his two

year old classroom to help him to attend with his preschool activities and stick

with them, since the teacher felt his attention skills were very poor with any

activity that he was not interested in. Basically he needs a lot of physical

and verbal prompting to stay on task. So I was a little surprised to see an

average score for attention skills.

If any of you parents have had this testing done before, and know anything about

what the scoring means and whether there are validity issues, I would appreciate

it.

As an aside, I also asked them if they would have a Behavior specialist

consultant do a functional behavioral assessment on him, and they said no. He

has had them done in early intervention, where he is observed in different

settings at different times. They did agree to coming one day to his classroom

to see how he is doing, I did tell them he has a 1:1, so maybe that will show

them his limitations (social/attention) in a better light that this one test. I

am just afraid he won't get offered the right services because he tested mild or

average on the above domains.

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