Hi Kelly,
This must be really frustrating, as I’m sure you were expecting the results of this assessment to lead to intervention that would help improve your student’s reading comprehension. I, of course, can’t help definitively explain why there’s a discrepancy between what you’re seeing in the classroom and what the school psychologist found in the results of their assessment, but I can help brainstorm some of the variables that may have contributed.
First, did the psychologist actually conclude that your student is “just fine,” or is that your perception based on the outcome of his testing? One of the main objectives for a school psychologist assessing a student is to determine eligibility for special education services. So, while I’m inferring that he did not qualify for reading intervention through special education, it might be the case that he did demonstrate weaknesses during his assessment, but they didn’t rise to the level of severity needed for this eligibility criteria.
While we often think about reading comprehension as being the product of skilled word reading and language comprehension, there are additional factors at play to consider. For example, it’s possible that your student struggles to sustain the deep attention required to read at length in a classroom setting (which can be noisy and distracting), but was able to adequately concentrate in a quiet, one-to-one environment with potentially shorter passages to read. Your student may have also demonstrated better motivation in the testing environment. Perhaps he had a strong desire to perform at his best in an attempt to not qualify for special education services, but lacks an equal motivation in his classwork or other standardized measures that you might provide classwide. Another possibility is that his performance on the typically small number of reading passages used for an assessment may also appear somewhat superficially inflated if he happened to have found those passage topics to be particularly interesting, or ones that he had a strong amount of background knowledge in.
As you are aware, reading comprehension questions can vary wildly in their scope and difficulty. Some questions are detail-oriented, while others require deeper analysis or inferencing. I’ve found in my own personal experience that some struggling readers have developed a compensatory strategy of paying careful attention to proper nouns and numerals, superficially inflating their ability to answer questions targeting names or numbers. You have likely also come across “reading comprehension” questions that target vocabulary knowledge, or those that could be answered by common sense, even by those who hadn’t read the text at all. Because so many factors contribute to skilled reading, and different texts and questions necessitate these various factors to varying degrees, a student may not always perform consistently across passages or even tests.
It’s also important to note that the format of these tests varies from test to test. Some formats are open-ended, while others provide multiple choice. Some questions are read aloud to the student, while others are provided in writing alone for students to read independently. Some tests permit the student to look back at the passage while others do not. Any of these format differences may influence a student’s performance.
While these variables shouldn’t provide drastically different results among the same student in well-validated assessments, the truth is that, unfortunately, many measures simply don’t have fantastic psychometric properties. Meaning that, whether due to the aforementioned variables or other contributing factors, students don’t always perform consistently across different measures of reading comprehension. Best practices include assessing with multiple measures of reading contribution and analyzing why any discrepancies occur. Evaluators would also want to rule out factors such as attention that may be contributing significantly to a student’s reading skills, and potentially also include a speech-language pathologist (SLP) to comprehensively evaluate how a student’s language skills may be impacting their academic performance.
If I were you, I would read through the student’s report and speak with the psychologist to try to investigate some possible reasons for this discrepancy. Remember that special education is not the only path- or even magic bullet- for ensuring your student receives the help he needs. Once you’re able to pinpoint the root(s) of his struggles with a bit more specificity, this should give you some direction in how to plan your instruction, any scaffolds that may be helpful, as well as small group tier 2 intervention.
