speech and occupational therapy yearly eval results

I have the report back from the ST and OT eval's we had done the beginning of this month.

Both therapists used standardized testing to evaluate Dominic. It completely removes the subjective from the equation.

For OT -
This year was the first time (his 3rd eval by this therapist) that he was able to sit and actually complete any cognitive testing. And technically, he'd aged out of the test she did, but she wanted to see what it showed. The age equivalent that Dominic tests out on with the Bayley scale of infant development is 25 months. Since this is the first time they've been able to even attempt this test, there's nothing to compare to.

Then she redid botht he Peabody Developmental Motor Scale and the Pediatric Evaluation of disability inventory.

For the Peabody -
Grasping - in 2009 he was at 28 months, and in 2010 he was at 43 months
Visual-Motor Integration - in 2009 he was at 27 months, and in 2010 he was at 37months
Fine motor Quotient- in 2009 he was less than the first percentile, and in 2010 he was up to the 3rd percentile, but neither of those has an age equivalent.

He went from Very Poor, Poor, and Very Poor in 2009 to Below average, poor and poor in 2010.

For the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory,
Self care functional skills went from 70 to 79
Mobility functional skills went from 85 to 94'
Social Function skills went from 47 to 56

There is a note in the written part of this that states "although overall scoring is not indicating this, Dominic continues to have higher skills that what testing indicates". So thats the drawback to the standardized testing, i guess.


From the Speech Eval -

Dominic was tested with the Preschool language scale, 4th edition.

Auditory comprehension - in 2009 was at 1 year 6 months, and is now at 1 year 11 months
Expressive communication - in 2009 was at 1 year 8 months and is now at 1 year 11 months

And he was tested with the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation, 2nd edition which ranked him at 2 years 0 months.

All speech sections are marked as being severe delay.

Both evaluation reports remarked on Dominic being a happy kid, which is tremendously important given all the therapy we're throwing at him.

Its really frustrating to have spent so many hours (and so much money) and to know how HARD Dominic has worked in the last year, to see only a few months improvement in standardized speech testing. Yes part of it could be that he had not worked with this ST in a full year. Yes, part of it could be that this was out of routine. Still, very frustrating.