need evaluator for an IEE in math for dyslexic 7th grader

Wish I could help but I am too far away.
Try looking on iser.com

Roxy,

Any standardized math test will tell you the same thing…which is basically why you aren’t finding anyone who specifically specializes in math evaluation. Some tests like the Brigance show the specific skills the student can and cannot do. I think the On Cloud Nine Math is one of the most specialized programs as you’ll find for math LD instruction. And as I’m sure you know, even Lindamood-Bell doesn’t need extensive math testing to determine a child needs help.

If you child has visual-spatial problems (common in kids with math LD’s), have you taken him to a developmental optometrist for an evaluation?

I think you’ll find that kids with severe LD’s will not get what they need in the public schools regardless of how good the evaluation is. Just as you have found you needed private reading therapy, you also will have to likely find the math help outside the school as well. But the evaluation is really not the key…the key is whether there is someone who really understands how to remediate math disorders, and my guess is that is more rare than someone who understands reading disorders.

I went to the national IDA conference last November and there was someone there presenting on an LD math curriculum, Making Math Real. You may want to contact them since there are very few LD math specialists.

http://www.makingmathreal.org/

Janis

thanks janis.

yes, that is the problem i am facing…

“the key is whether there is someone who really understands how to remediate math disorders, and my guess is that is more rare than someone who understands reading disorders. ”

i have found it is very rare for someone to understand both the reading and the math, how the math relates to dyslexia and how to remediate the math.

we have had him evaluated and he is not a good candidate or in need of vision therapy.

i am concerned that what we have tried privately (100 hours of lmbell on cloud nine math and 18 months of private math tutoring) have not allowed him to progress further…i realize that the independent eval itself is just an eval. and will most likely show him at the same level that the public school has placed him at, BUT my motivation for the independent eval IS the recommendations.

what can we do, privately next for this child in math?

at what point to you just teach child to be a calculator expert and really move on from the basic facts?

he will be going into 8th grade next year and his lack of math skills, and the resource room, are very depressing to him and his self esteem.

thanks for any more input on this…

i am open to any ideas at this point!!

roxy

I do work sometimes on trying to remediate math; part of the problem is that nobody will take it seriously, if the kid can read and punch a calculator teachers and most poarents don’t see any problems. Then when the kid fails algebra they just slide him through one way or another, passing the buck up the line. At high school graduation and college then everybody can look back and lay blame, but it’s too late to help the student much.
When I do get a chance to work on this kind of problem, I find that the only thing to do is to go right back to fundamentals. Work on the meaning of numbers and number sense, the base ten system and how it is constructed, what fractions and decimals mean concretely, solving real-life problems with money and areas and so forth. You can use a set of tables glued to the desk if he really can’t remember, but avoid calculators because the goal is to think about numbers and use them concretely.
On this line, I just had an odd tutoring session last week; a student who is in Grade 8 and quite bright, has had a lot of tutoring in a lot of areas over the years, and I’m now seeing him once a week to help with math. We did OK on all the number stuff and he is doing it adequately; I wasn’t happy with his avoidance of diagrams and number lines, but they all do it, preferring the “quick” and “easy” tricks; now he is in geometry and I suddenly found gaping holes in his abilities that have been covered up. He was supposed to use a little plastic right angle to draw a perpendicular through a given line and a given point — what you expect to be a two-second job. He *could not* place the right angle. He tried placing it at a point off the line, tried pointing it at the point like an arrow, tried pointing it at the line like an arrow; *could not* see how he was supposed to line it up. I showed him, expecting this bright kid to be able to model what he had seen; still couldn’t do it. Forty minutes later after verbal directing and prodding he was getting it more or less but still not solid. I have had other issues with him before when he was supposed to do complicated rotations and he was extremely weak, but I wrote it off at the time to being asked to do advanced geometry with no basis having been taught. OK, this is a student who has “had” a geometry unit in our dearly-hated spiral curriculm for the last eight years, yet he apparently cannot do concrete work with measures and constructions at all. What you need to do to help a student is to look for gaping holes like this and then re-build the skills, whatever they may be.

Every once in a while there is a student like that who really doesn’t grasp the spatial stuff! (A fair number struggle more than you’d expect with things like plotting points on a graph, too.)
As I said on the IDA board, though, I have come to respect (not happily) that if a student thinks he can’t do math, then an evaluation will test his attitude, not his math abilities.
What do the WISC and otehr scores tell you about how he thinks, to give you something to work with?
Where do his skills break down? And is he lucky enough to think that he can’t “do math” — but thinks it’s something you do in school, and does okay with the simple real world concepts?
Just as with dyslexia you can build oral language and abstract thinking in everyday stuff, you can do the same with math. Peggy Kaye has some neat books about bringing math concepts into everyday things in a non-threatening way, and she includes information about how children develop mathematical concepts, so you don’t ask a question that a child isn’t conceptually ready to answer (and besides, it’s fascinating). Marilyn Burns also has good materials, but I find they have a little too much language for dyslexic kiddos to handle without some adjustments.