Autism, RightStart™, and Testing Scores

My 11 daughter has high functioning autism. We consider her to be a 5th grader, and she just finished up Level D (scoring 100% on the end of the year test!). She had serious problems with math until we found Right Start. She was 8 years old and still could not reliably tell you what 2+3 was. Then once she labored to figure that out, she couldn’t tell you what 3+2 was. It was like that every single time.

A dear friend let us borrow Level B for the summer so we could try it out before putting all the money into it (since she’s my last child, I was hesitant to invest so much money on yet another program that wouldn’t work). As you must have guessed, it was a huge success and I purchased the curriculum eagerly.

I just had my daughter take the ITBS (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) a couple of weeks ago for the first time. She has previously been tested by psychiatrists as part of her autism spectrum evaluations, but she’s never done a ‘bubble’ test where she had to read the questions herself and fill in the answers. For a child on the spectrum, that alone can be a challenge. And I have her take the grade-level tests simply so I can compare her to her age/grade peers. I know she will be behind in math because there are some topics she simply hasn’t covered yet, getting such a late start. Yet, she has always managed to test only slightly below grade level, which is amazing to me.

So this time, I was expecting her scores to be lower, because of the nature of the testing and this being something completely new to her. I was quite wrong! She scored in the 69th percentile for Math Concepts & Estimation. This is on the upper end of the Average range, and her grade equivalent was 6.8 (which means that she performed on this 5th grade test the way you would expect a child in the 8th month of 6th grade to perform on this test). For Problem Solving & Data Interpretation, she scored in the 51st percentile which is right in the middle of the Average range. Her grade equivalent was 5.9 which is exactly what she is! Her math computation scores are quite low but those are irrelevant to me because she has slow processing speed and I do not ever pressure her to finish the drill sheets for a fast time – and math computation is not included in the overall scoring anyway.

Breaking it down into the subsets, she scored 100% right on both Measurement and Probability & Statistics questions and also scored very high on the Algebra subset. To me, this shows that Right Start teaches kids how to think mathematically. And that, in my opinion, is the most important thing!

I have rambled on long enough, I think. I just wanted to share that my child with special needs – who didn’t even start using language to communicate until she was 3.5 years old and who didn’t understand anything to do with math until she was 8, just score on grade level and slightly higher as a 5th grader, when she has only finished the 3rd grade RightStart book! Amazing!!

Thank you, RightStart!
Jennifer C.