Neale Analysis of reading.

[supermum98]

Was told last June that my ds reading age was 11.5 (have it in writing), last week was told it is now 10.8. This has filled me with distrust as I felt that the 11.5 was way over. At that time I felt his reading age was 9.5 ish. judging by the books he was reading. A few weeks ago was told it was 11 ish. What do you make of this? Does anyone know if it is possible to get that degree of variation. When he had a reading age of 6, I was told that to get to 6.5 was a significant leap, so surely to go from 11.5 down to 10.8 is significant unless the initial figure was plucked out of the air. My concerns were brushed under the carpet. As I have not been happy with the literacy intervention, the only way I can tell if it is working is by tracking progress, but the tracking is unreliable based on this. Mind you I shouldn't worry of course as they have plenty of kids who don't read as well as my ds. somebody should ban such statements from the training manual I'm fed-up with these sort of comparisons, totally unprofessional.

All reading tests will give you different ages, and none of them are accurate.

6 to 6.5 maybe significant . Many 6 year olds are learning to read in leaps and bounds. Rather less difference between what the "average" child is reading at 10.8 ( nearly 11) and 11.6 , 10 months later.

Ok but I have been told that they should be tracking progress to prove that literacy intervention is working. Is there any value then in using such assessments to track progress if the results are at best inaccurate at worst meaningless. Have been told he needs a structured multisensory intervention, ie. FFT Hi 5, Catch up reading to name but a few. He is just reading with his TA and that is deemed sufficient. What should I be asking for?

Going down is not good, but it is very common to get varying scores on any reading test. In the NARA he will have read different stories and been asked different questions from last time, so you could argue that he's not been tested on the same thing. A test like a NARA gives a snapshot of how your child read on that particular day at that particular time.
He probably isn't just reading to the TA. Hopefully she is stopping and asking him questions about the text, asking him to predict what might happen next, asking his opinion on events, asking him to find the most interesting word on teh page etc etc etc. But if you ask a child , they'll generally just say they'd read.