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Woodcock Johnson III - Comparing Individual Results Year By Year


Guest JMaher1972
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Guest JMaher1972

Good morning! I am new to this forum and really hope that somebody might be able to help. I am the parent of a 12 year old boy with Autism. We have three years worth of Woodcock Johnson III data that show our son's level of performance as decreasing drastically. His overall abilities seem to be increasing. The administrators of the test tell us that his scores will decrease as he gets older and that the gap will continue to grow. HELP! How does a child that seems to be making progress lose grade level equivalency? This is devastating to us and we cannot understand if this is true or another snake oil sale. Can anyone please help point us in the right direction or offer some advise? We have been reading the Wrights Law Books and they do not seem to cover this topic and internet searches have not gotten us anything but a bunch of dead links. Please help if you can, we would do the same, if possible.

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Good morning! I am new to this forum and really hope that somebody might be able to help. I am the parent of a 12 year old boy with Autism. We have three years worth of Woodcock Johnson III data that show our son's level of performance as decreasing drastically. His overall abilities seem to be increasing. The administrators of the test tell us that his scores will decrease as he gets older and that the gap will continue to grow. HELP! How does a child that seems to be making progress lose grade level equivalency? This is devastating to us and we cannot understand if this is true or another snake oil sale. Can anyone please help point us in the right direction or offer some advise? We have been reading the Wrights Law Books and they do not seem to cover this topic and internet searches have not gotten us anything but a bunch of dead links. Please help if you can, we would do the same, if possible.

 

I cannot speak directly to the test results but I can share our experience: the leaps that normal kids make as they get older are are huge and the steps that our ds made were small.

 

Our ds's disability is actually far more pronounced now that he is an adult than when he was younger. When he was younger, it was amplified via behavior. Now as an adult, it is amplified in his thought processes.

 

I don't know if that is what you are seeing or not. But age 11-12 on have been spiraling down yrs for us across various different issues. Some stabilize from yr to yr while others seem to get better and others seem to decline.

 

Don't know if that helps or not. But :grouphug: regardless.

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Guest JMaher1972

Thank you for your response. What I am looking for, although your response is greatly appreciated, is should standard scores be decreasing due to age or test revision? How can a child's age strictly be used as a way to describe lowering of age equivalent? I really do appreciate your response.

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Thank you for your response. What I am looking for, although your response is greatly appreciated, is should standard scores be decreasing due to age or test revision? How can a child's age strictly be used as a way to describe lowering of age equivalent? I really do appreciate your response.

 

I guess I'm saying that those results don't surprise me. If scores are normed by age, then as older kids are making mental leaps and autistic spectrum kids aren't, the scores are going to decrease.

 

From a Woodstock Johnson iii website: Raw scores are totaled and converted into age and grade equivalents, percentile ranks, and discrepancy scores with use of the Scoring Tables.

 

So......what appears to be increases in your child's abilities probably are. However, they are not commensurate in increases of peers. So as scores are normed, your child's actual progress compared to peers might be decreasing.

 

I don't have multiple yrs of test results for our ds to compare, but the results you describe are what I would expect.

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I guess I'm saying that those results don't surprise me. If scores are normed by age, then as older kids are making mental leaps and autistic spectrum kids aren't, the scores are going to decrease.

 

From a Woodstock Johnson iii website: Raw scores are totaled and converted into age and grade equivalents, percentile ranks, and discrepancy scores with use of the Scoring Tables.

 

So......what appears to be increases in your child's abilities probably are. However, they are not commensurate in increases of peers. So as scores are normed, your child's actual progress compared to peers might be decreasing.

 

I don't have multiple yrs of test results for our ds to compare, but the results you describe are what I would expect.

 

If you have any references to where I could read about this, I'd truly appreciate it. I think I may be seeing some of this, too. In our case, a strange clue was seeing a cogat non-verbal reasoning score drop from a 99th percentile to something much lower in a rather short time period. I've read articles on WISC score patterns in dc with aspergers but they don't fit with the scores we have.

 

It's very frustrating when you feel an answer is hidden in the score patterns but you just can't figure it out.

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I guess I'm saying that those results don't surprise me. If scores are normed by age, then as older kids are making mental leaps and autistic spectrum kids aren't, the scores are going to decrease.

 

From a Woodstock Johnson iii website: Raw scores are totaled and converted into age and grade equivalents, percentile ranks, and discrepancy scores with use of the Scoring Tables.

 

So......what appears to be increases in your child's abilities probably are. However, they are not commensurate in increases of peers. So as scores are normed, your child's actual progress compared to peers might be decreasing.

 

I don't have multiple yrs of test results for our ds to compare, but the results you describe are what I would expect.

 

What I've bolded is the key issue. All standardized tests are normed against a large cohort of peers. If you picture it as a track, a child may have run around 4 times last year in x minutes. His peers may have run around 5 times in x minutes. This year, the child may have made great progress! He can now run around the track 7 times in x minutes! His peers, however, can run around 10 times in x minutes. Though the child is improving, the gap with respect to other kids is widening, as they too are improving--but at a different rate.

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What I've bolded is the key issue. All standardized tests are normed against a large cohort of peers. If you picture it as a track, a child may have run around 4 times last year in x minutes. His peers may have run around 5 times in x minutes. This year, the child may have made great progress! He can now run around the track 7 times in x minutes! His peers, however, can run around 10 times in x minutes. Though the child is improving, the gap with respect to other kids is widening, as they too are improving--but at a different rate.

 

Yes. This is why 9yo ds tested so much worse than 7yo ds, even though if you compared them at 7, they were the same.

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If you have any references to where I could read about this, I'd truly appreciate it. I think I may be seeing some of this, too. In our case, a strange clue was seeing a cogat non-verbal reasoning score drop from a 99th percentile to something much lower in a rather short time period. I've read articles on WISC score patterns in dc with aspergers but they don't fit with the scores we have.

 

It's very frustrating when you feel an answer is hidden in the score patterns but you just can't figure it out.

 

I don't have anything that I can refer you to. A lot of the info is in my head from my college days and psy degree.

 

it really is just simple logic in many respects, though. Think about the teen yrs and how much change takes place in their abstract thinking/cognitive skills. For example, it is completely normal in those yrs to move from being completely dependent and concrete in thinking to being completely independent and fully abstract in reasoning. Those are huge mental shifts. Not progressing at such a rapid pace will automatically cause significant drops in scores.

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I don't have anything that I can refer you to. A lot of the info is in my head from my college days and psy degree.

 

it really is just simple logic in many respects, though. Think about the teen yrs and how much change takes place in their abstract thinking/cognitive skills. For example, it is completely normal in those yrs to move from being completely dependent and concrete in thinking to being completely independent and fully abstract in reasoning. Those are huge mental shifts. Not progressing at such a rapid pace will automatically cause significant drops in scores.

 

Yes, it's that abstract, categorical reasoning. Will it ever catch up?

 

And, yet, sometimes everything seems very normal and even better than normal. I guess because at least one area of intelligence is something like genius level. Perhaps I should just shut up and be thankful for it all; instead I want to figure it all out.

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In our case, a strange clue was seeing a cogat non-verbal reasoning score drop from a 99th percentile to something much lower in a rather short time period.

 

Do you know the level(s) where this happened? The reason I ask is that the CogAT prior to 3rd grade level is untimed, while for 3rd grade and up is tightly timed. A 2E kid with speed issues will likely do *much* better on the untimed test.

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Do you know the level(s) where this happened? The reason I ask is that the CogAT prior to 3rd grade level is untimed, while for 3rd grade and up is tightly timed. A 2E kid with speed issues will likely do *much* better on the untimed test.

 

From 3rd to 5th. So it looks like both should have been timed. I wonder if the speed issue gets worse over time, too. It certainly seems to have done so as the work has become more complicated.

 

Sorry to the OP for hijacking this thread.

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