Learning Disabilities Testing
Some students learn easily regardless of the teaching strategies or academic curricula selected. For many students, however, learning is an ongoing challenge despite high intelligence and motivation.
When a student has persistent school difficulties, it is important to consider the possibility of a specific learning disability that may require psychological testing.
Dr. Pratt only does testing for specific learning disabilities as part of comprehensive psychological testing. For more information, please click here.
Common signs of a specific learning disability:
- Cognitive Poor fund of general information, difficulty sequencing ideas, little awareness of cause and effect relationships, poor ability to organize ideas and information, and inconsistent recall of learned information
- Reading Poor phonetic decoding skills, slow and labored reading, difficulty understanding what was read, poor ability to focus on main ideas and trouble with comprehension due to word by word decoding
- Perceptual-Motor Reversals, rotations and inversions of letters and numbers, imprecise fine motor coordination, such as unstable pencil grip, papers are generally sloppy, poorly formed or illegible letters, slow rate of writing and poor quality on timed tasks
- Spelling Trouble developing letter-sound associations, transposition of letters when spelling words, omission or substitution of sounds when spelling words, confuses words such as "to", "two" and "too", and has to think about spelling of common words
- Mathematics Trouble distinguishing letters from numbers, confusing arithmetic signs, slow computational skills, labored mathematical reasoning and difficulty recalling the sequence of an operational process
- Written Language Slow and labored writing, imprecise and unclear expression, poor organization of thoughts, incorrect use of punctuation and composition usually too short for the purpose
- Spoken Language Trouble pronouncing individual words, confuses words that sound similar, difficulty grasping what others say to them, limited range of vocabulary and difficulty retrieving the appropriate words for a situation
- Work and Study Habits Poor organization and budgeting of time, difficulty completing work on time, and difficulty sustaining effort on a task
- Emotional Nightly frustration with homework, excessive test anxiety, low academic self-confidence and embarrassment when peers see work