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Unusual DORA Results


Condessa
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I had my kids do reading assessments the other day and dd7 (who we believe has dyslexia) actually did well enough on the lowest set of high frequency words to turn on the reading comprehension section for the first time.  She read slowly and painstakingly decoded words, and broke down crying a couple of times—and tested at a mid-sixth grade comprehension level!  We’ve been working so hard for the past year since we began to suspect dyslexia and switched to AAR and AAS.  Her high-frequency words and phonics scores were still at K level, though her word recognition score increased from mid-K to mid-1st for the first time.

I’ve long suspected that dd7 is 2e.  Would I be right that this seems to support that?

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Are you looking at grade-equivalent scores? This is what that means.

GRADE-EQUIVALENT SCORES The Grade-Equivalent score compares your child’s performance on grade-level material against the average performance of students at other grade levels on that same material and is reported in terms of grade level and months. If your 5th grade child obtains a grade-equivalent of 10.5 on a standardized math or reading test, it does not mean that your child is solving math problems or reading at the mid-10th grade level. It means that she or he can solve 5th grade math problems and read 5th grade material as well as the average 10th grade student can read and solve 5th grade math problems. Your child is performing much better than the average 5th grader but most likely would not perform as well if tested using 10th grade material as they have not yet been exposed to 10th grade material. Caution should always be used when interpreting grade equivalents, especially when attempting to use grade equivalents as the basis for a grade placement discussion.

 

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6 hours ago, Michelle Conde said:

I had my kids do reading assessments the other day and dd7 (who we believe has dyslexia) actually did well enough on the lowest set of high frequency words to turn on the reading comprehension section for the first time.  She read slowly and painstakingly decoded words, and broke down crying a couple of times—and tested at a mid-sixth grade comprehension level!  We’ve been working so hard for the past year since we began to suspect dyslexia and switched to AAR and AAS.  Her high-frequency words and phonics scores were still at K level, though her word recognition score increased from mid-K to mid-1st for the first time.

I’ve long suspected that dd7 is 2e.  Would I be right that this seems to support that?

 

Yes, in general, a wide disparity in scores within testing can be indicative of 2e.

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DORA is adaptive. Having said that, the reading comprehension, unless they changed it since DD did it, is less a reading test and more a memory one-the questions aren’t super-hard, and passages are short, but require remembering what you read because you cannot flip back. I can easily see a child with a good memory being able to pick up the gist and remember enough to be able to guess well on the questions, bust struggling in comprehension of, say, an entire book or a chapter. 

 

But yes, it does sound like 2e may be a real possibility. 

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6 hours ago, calbear said:

Are you looking at grade-equivalent scores? This is what that means.

GRADE-EQUIVALENT SCORES The Grade-Equivalent score compares your child’s performance on grade-level material against the average performance of students at other grade levels on that same material and is reported in terms of grade level and months. If your 5th grade child obtains a grade-equivalent of 10.5 on a standardized math or reading test, it does not mean that your child is solving math problems or reading at the mid-10th grade level. It means that she or he can solve 5th grade math problems and read 5th grade material as well as the average 10th grade student can read and solve 5th grade math problems. Your child is performing much better than the average 5th grader but most likely would not perform as well if tested using 10th grade material as they have not yet been exposed to 10th grade material. Caution should always be used when interpreting grade equivalents, especially when attempting to use grade equivalents as the basis for a grade placement discussion.

 

 

I did not think it meant that she could read as well as a sixth grader, but I was pretty shocked at how well she did.  Excepting for vocabulary, in the past her DORA scores have been low across the board.  I was hoping/expecting to see some gains, but I didn’t think she would be above grade level in anything but vocab.

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  • 2 weeks later...

When my child took the DORA years ago, his knowledge (not his reading comprehension) gave him a higher-than-expected reading comprehension score. He was tired and did not even attempt to read the final passage the test gave him, but he still answered several of the questions correctly because he knew the topic. Mercifully it was not enough to give him another passage.

FWIW, I have always suspected he is 2e, too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a child with dyslexia who has ALWAYS tested well above average in reading comprehension, even when her decoding skills were so bad that she was only reading one word out of every ten.  I have never understood how she has always been able to glean meaning from such little input, but she has.  She's improved significantly in her decoding, but her comprehension still FAR outstrips her decoding.  It's....bizarre.  Nobody has ever been able to explain how she is able to do it, but she has a very advanced vocabulary, a strong narrative memory, and has listened to thousands of hours of books.  

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It doesn't surprise me that a bright child with dyslexia would score well above her grade level in comprehension, especially if she's a hard worker and really took her time. It always amazes me how much dyslexic 2e kids can understand when they read, even when they miss so many of the words.

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6 hours ago, Mainer said:

It doesn't surprise me that a bright child with dyslexia would score well above her grade level in comprehension, especially if she's a hard worker and really took her time. It always amazes me how much dyslexic 2e kids can understand when they read, even when they miss so many of the words.

Yes! My 6.5 yo was recently diagnosed dyslexic. Her phonological processing and awareness skills are somewhere around the 6th %ile and the way she processes visual information is also weird (when re-creating an image with design tiles, she will often do a rotated or reflected version, and seriously struggles to even *see* that her design isn't the same one that she was instructed to copy, even when the educational therapist pushes back a bit with things like, "Now, is that really the same as what I made? Can you compare them really carefully?"). But it has taken us almost six full months to get to this point, because the first few people we took her to just gave her basic reading and/or comprehension evals, and she passed with scores that were above where she "should" be. I kept telling people that something was still off, and I didn't know what it was, but we got caught in this net of "insurance won't pay for it so we won't test for it." So we ended up having to go to a language disorder specialist who did not accept our insurance but who finally did run through an extensive language evaluation. It was astonishing! This kid who could "read" the passages given her on the Woodcock-Johnson and other basic reading tests by her neuropsychologist and get decent scores (a full year ahead of her age, so not bad, but not great either) could only read basic CVC type stuff with 33% accuracy *when* taken out of context. And when asked to do stuff like name as many girl names as she could in 60 seconds, said kid could often only name 1-2 things in the given category. But she's so smart with such high processing speed, that she was able to con a decent number of people into thinking she was reading just fine!

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