Emily: Part One

Below find Part 1 of the report I received in the mail the other day from the neuropsychologist who tested Emily in the beginning of the month. The report was quite long so I am breaking it up in to two entries. Behavioral Observations

Emily is an outgoing, delightful, and well-mannered girl. Throughout the evaluation she was friendly and hard working. Emily presents as an engaging and interesting child. Emily expressed feeling very tired and was noted to yawn and stretch many times. With regard to attention, Emily was easily distracted. In addition, toward the end of each testing session, she displayed increased fidgeting, interrupting and impulsive responses. Emily was generally able to understand test directions and orally presented items. Emily's expressive communications were notable for word finding difficulties. Within the structured one to one context of the assessment Emily was able to initiate and shift within and between various tasks. In contrast, Emily displayed some difficulty regulating her behavior during the evaluation. She was often fidgety , doing such things as looking around the room and fidgeting in the chair. Emily was also observed to interrupt the examiner and respond impulsively to test questions, without always seeming to have fully thought them through.

Test Results:

Verbal Comprehension: High Average Range
Perceptual Reasoning: Average
Working Memory: Average
Processing Speed: Low End Of The Average Range
General Ability Index: High Average Range
Abstract Verbal Reasoning: High Average
Expressive Vocabulary: Superior Range
Comprehension: High Average
Digit Span: Emily's ability to repeat orally presented strings of digits in reverse and forward sequesce measured in the High Average Range.
Letter and Number Sequencing: Average Range
Block Design: Visual Construction Skills Average Range
Picture Concepts: Conceptual reasoning based on visual information measured at the high end of the average range.
Matrix Reasoning: visual-spatial reasoning: average range
Coding: Emily's graphometer speed measures in the low end of the average range.
Symbol Search: Average range
Numerical Operations: Average range
Spelling: Superior range
Contextual Conventions: Emily's overall ability to use appropriate capitalization, spelling, and punctuation when writing a measured below grade expectations.
Contextual Language: Emily's vocabulary tended to be ordinary and while she expressed some interesting ideas, she had difficulty organizing her story.
Story Construction: Average Range
Silent Reading Test: High Average range
Sight Word Reading: Average efficiency
Phonemic Decoding: Average ranged efficiency of sounding out nonsense words.
Automatized Series: Within age expectations on tests of reciting basic verbal series (e.g., alphabet, months of year).
Sentence memory: Superior range ability to repeat orally presented sentences verbatim.
Story Memory-immediate recall: Very Superior range ability to repeat orally presented stories.
Story Memory-delayed recall: Very Superior range ability to repeat orally presented stories after a 20 minute delay.
Story Memory-Delayed Recognition: Superior range recognition of story details following a delay.
Verbal Learning-immediate recall: High end of the average range
Verbal Learning-delayed recall: average range
Verbal Learning: Delayed recognition: average range
Visual Spacial Processing and Visual Memory: Emily's accuracy on a design copy task assessing visual-motor integration measured slightly below age expectations. Many of her errors appeared to be due to her tendency to rush on this task.
Copy: Below average: Emily took a disorganized approach to to copying a complex geometric design, resulting in a final product that was distorted.
Immediate recall: Below average: Immediately after copying the design, Emily was asked to draw it from memory. Emily was able top recreate a distorted outline but lost most of the details.
Delayed recall: Below Average: further distortion.
Grooved pegboard: Dominant hand (right) On a test of fine motor speed Emily measured below age expectations. Non-dominant hand (left) : On a test of fine motor speed, Emily measured significantly below age expectations.
Emotional Control: 96th percentile: clinically significant
Behavior Rating Inventory: 90th percentile: borderline clinically significant
Organization of Materials: 88th percentile: clinically significant
Executive Control: 90th percentile: clinically significant
Letter Sequencing: Significantly below average speed of alphabetic sequencing
Letter Fluency: Average range verbal fluency in response to letter cues.
Verbal Fluency: Superior range (When contrasted with Letter Fluency, Emily's higher score suggests that she benefits from external organization of materials.
Sort Recognition: Significantly below average ability to recognize organizational frameworks used by examiner to sort cards.
Color naming: significantly below average speed of naming colors from a limited repertoire.
Cognitive Problems/inattention: 73rd percentile: clinically significant