• When Samantha was asked how she felt about the CAAT and the math inventory skills tests, what areas she struggled with and what areas she found okay, she indicated that she wasn't surprised about the results. Samantha found the reading passages very difficult and ran out of time to complete the reading section. She has always found math to be difficult, especially word problems. Samantha was always able to rely on her memory to do multiplication, adding and subtracting. She was pleasantly surprised about her vocabulary. Samantha admitted that when she sees a word in isolation, instead of seeing it combined in a sentence, she is able to read it better.
Questions for practitioners to consider:
What areas require further assessment and what tools would you use? At this point, do you see any potential learning disabilities? If yes, provide a rationale.

Further assessment
Need to assess her reading further to understand her difficulties
  • Her reading was slow and she struggled with decoding the words, which interfered with her comprehension.
  • She often missed words and left off endings.
  • Samantha often lost her place when reading the passage.
  • She would read some of the syllables backwards (saw for was).
  • Her comprehension was excellent when the passage was read to her orally along with the questions, as compared to her oral and silent reading of the passage.
  • When given sight words she was able to read them, but when nonsense words were mixed in she struggled with breaking the units down in the word to sound it out. She most likely scored higher on her vocabulary due to her good memory skills and ongoing exposure to reading materials.
  • Samantha struggled with cloze paragraphs.