educational testing

[Guest guest]

Another thing that might have been meant by " pulling down " the scores in the

other two areas are the fact that the verbal discrepancies - ie not

understanding the language well might affect how they score on the other areas

because they don't understand the question or the answer. One item I remember

from Maggie's testing was they asked her what do you do when you are cold. She

grabbed a tissue and pretended to blow her nose. She thought they meant if you

had a cold. Didn't understand the instructions. Had a reasonable answer but

one that was due to the hearing loss. (in fact they were surprised she knew

that meaning of the word cold before the temperature cold.) If you deliver a

test verbally of non-verbal content, t he instructions might not be understood

well. For instance, the test may ask which one of these comes next or which

one is unlike the others. This would be a non-verbal content question but the

instructions were verbalized. Of course Jill's explanation is equally likely

and in truth was what came to me first as well.

'

PS, there aren't many tests that are " just for " deaf/hoh kids. Some that I can

think of would be in the auditory skills category or sign language asssessments.

But usually when a test is normed on deaf kids the norms are VERY low. Because

traditionally kids with hearing losses were diagnosed late and started off with

a huge language gap that often never got made up. In fact, the late 90's with

the work out of Colorado (Christie Yoshinaga-itano and colleagues) and the early

identification and intervention of kids in Colorado with newborn screening, this

was the first time that deaf/hoh kids were scoring high enough to compare to

typical kids actually occurred. A big controversy is going on with the

pediatric, public health and hearing loss communities right now. The public

health folks are criticizing the fact that there aren't comparisons of kids with

UNHS to kids without UNHS on a population basis. This is largely because no one

documented the fact that most deaf kids couldn't even score high enough on

testing to even be scored in years past. So there are no historical scores on

tests normed on hearing kids with deaf/HOH kids. All of this to say, if your

school gives your child a test normed on deaf children and says that means your

child is doing as well as can be expected, take this with more than a grain of

salt. They are probably trying to get you to lower your expectations.

>eskilvr@... writes:

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Verbal abilities " pulled down " his scores in the other two areas - which

>really isn't all that surprising.>>

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