Imagine that you have just received the full edpsych report for one of your students and now it is your responsibility to do something with it!

After jumping through the hoops to get your student’s name on the list for assessment, and then waiting through sometimes several months, until his or her name comes to the top of the list, you finally have this document that supposedly will assist you in setting up a program to meet the child’s needs.

After reading through this document, the next step is to figure out what resources and strategies you have that will fit into the plan set out by the educational psychologist. Where do you start?

Here are three things to look for in that report:

1. After reading through the entire document, find the summary page. This page will tell you what assessments have been completed by the edpsych and what the results were.

2. On the summary page, find the areas of cognition where deficits were identified. Highlight those areas where the results fell into the “below average” or “extremely low” zone.

3. Now, look to the page of recommendations to see what has been suggested as ways to support the student in the classroom setting and perhaps in the resource room. This was always the challenging area for me, as I wasn’t familiar with many of the programs or strategies that were suggested.

In developing the Roadways to Reading System, I took into consideration how each strategy we use would impact students with deficits in one or more of the seven cognitive areas.

Now, as an example, after reading an edpsych report I see that the student is “below average” in working memory, I immediately know that this student will benefit from explicit, direct teaching with continuous review and repetition. For reading I will add this student to my group for daily repeated reading sessions to build fluency, and likely add in daily sight word work as well. These students need to learn and overlearn, until content is at an automatic level, which will relieve their working memory of so much overload. And…..I already have those necessary tools at my fingertips, as they are part of the Roadways to Reading program.

 This is just one example. You will likely find that your students’ profiles will show deficits in more than one area of cognition. As you build your individual education plan for your student, you simply add on the pieces of the Roadways to Reading System that will support each cognitive deficit.