About My Services

Assessments and Instruction

Questions? Please reach out to learn more.

  • An abbreviated assessment that focuses on reading rate, accuracy, and fluency. It’s a great screening tool that gives you big picture numbers, but does not have the granular details that the full assessment does.

    • GORT 5

    • SORT

    • WJ-V (Selected sub tests pertaining to word attack)

    • Informal Symbol/Sound Test

  • A thorough battery of 10-15 measures - how many exactly depend on student profile and age.

    Included is a 45 minute to hour meeting in which I review the evaluations and help you interpret the scores and what they mean.

    It will give you a very detailed picture of your student’s strengths and needs - by the time we finish talking, it is my goal that you will know exactly where the “missing link” is, and what needs to happen to resolve it.

    This evaluation gives detailed information about a student’s:

    Oral Language:

    • Receptive Vocabulary

    • Expressive Vocabulary

    • Verbal Absurdities

    A student’s proficiency with oral language is a helpful proxy for their aptitude for reading and reading comprehension. Vocabulary, in particular, correlates strongly.

    Auditory / Phonological Skills:

    • Sounding Out

    • Blending

    • Phoneme Isolation

    • Auditory Conceputalization

    Orthographic Mapping and Processing:

    • Symbol Imagery

    • Sight Words

    • Reading unfamiliar words by automatically breaking them down into recognized chunks like tion, ment, etc

    Rapid Automatized Naming

    • It’s important, but nobody really knows why, and if they tell you otherwise, they’re lying. That is to say - it is unknown what this skill actually contributes during the reading process.

    • It is widely understood that slow RAN tends to make for slow reading.

    • It is also understood that RAN cannot be meaningfully taught - it is a type of processing speed.

    • As a diagnostic marker, it is helpful as we create realistic goals. Some students may, realistically, not read as quickly as their peers. That isn’t to say they can’t get faster - but the bigger gains will be how much accurate they become and how much less of a chore reading feels like.

    Use of Context and Language

    • Does their vocabulary support them when reading?

    • Are they processing the text as they read?

    • Are they overly relying on predictive reading?

    Comprehension

    • Are missed questions coming from poor decoding / information not making it in?

    • What types of questions are being missed?

    • For relevant students, I administer an older version of the GORT that has open ended questions without multiple choice to see if there is a difference between multiple choice score and free response.

    Types of Errors and Diagnostic Info:

    • Do they tend to guess real words they know when decoding?

    • Do they struggle with certain types of vowels or letter sounds?

    • Do they grab on to chunks of words as they read, or sound out letter by letter?

    • What is easy? What is not?

    • Where is the level of automaticity

  • Reading Instruction is 1:1 and delivered entirely by myself, using research validated programs. Instructional Levels are changed, in real time, every minute of every hour, as I see capability grow. This is something that is not possible at larger operations, and a level of quality and oversight that only an independent practitioner can provide.

    The total cost of the program is difficult to say without seeing your student. The total cost will depend on the severity of need. After the evaluation, I will give you a recommendation for a certain number of hours, based on the data.