Woodcock-Johnson IV (eBook)

Reports, Recommendations, and Strategies

Nancy Mather, Lynne E. Jaffe (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 3. Auflage
600 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-118-86070-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Includes online access to new, customizable WJ IV score tables, graphs, and forms for clinicians

Woodcock-Johnson IV: Reports, Recommendations, and Strategies offers psychologists, clinicians, and educators an essential resource for preparing and writing psychological and educational reports after administering the Woodcock-Johnson IV. Written by Drs. Nancy Mather and Lynne E. Jaffe, this text enhances comprehension and use of this instrument and its many interpretive features. This book offers helpful information for understanding and using the WJ IV scores, provides tips to facilitate interpretation of test results, and includes sample diagnostic reports of students with various educational needs from kindergarten to the postsecondary level. The book also provides a wide variety of recommendations for cognitive abilities; oral language; and the achievement areas of reading, written language, and mathematics. It also provides guidelines for evaluators and recommendations focused on special populations, such as sensory impairments, autism, English Language Learners, and gifted and twice exceptional students, as well as recommendations for the use of assistive technology. The final section provides descriptions of the academic and behavioral strategies mentioned in the reports and recommendations. The unique access code included with each book allows access to downloadable, easy-to-customize score tables, graphs, and forms.

This essential guide

• Facilitates the use and interpretation of the WJ IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities, Tests of Oral
  Language, and Tests of Achievement
• Explains scores and various interpretive features
• Offers a variety of types of diagnostic reports
• Provides a wide variety of educational recommendations and evidence-based strategies 

NANCY MATHER, PHD, is a Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies. She is a coauthor of the Woodcock-Johnson^® IV.

LYNNE E. JAFFE, PHD, is in private practice specializing in psychoeducational evaluations, educational therapy, and consulting regarding interventions for students with learning problems.

Textauszug

Part 1
Descriptive and Interpretive Information

Explanation of Major Broad Cognitive Abilities

Cognitive processing consists of the many different mental actions that a person uses to make sense of information that comes into awareness either through the senses or by retrieval from memory. Cognitive processing includes actions such as recognizing, thinking about, working with, or changing the form of information. New information must be processed before or as it is transferred into long-term memory for later use. Following are descriptions of some of the cognitive abilities involved in cognitive processing.

Along with the descriptions of the cognitive abilities are examples of tasks that involve them. This is not to imply that the cognitive ability discussed is the only one involved in that task, because cognitive abilities are not discrete. The innumerable functions that the brain performs are continuous and integrated; they have been defined and named, for purposes of research and treatment, by neuroscientists and physicians. As John Horn (1991) stated:

Specifying different features of cognition is like slicing smoke—dividing a continuous, homogeneous, irregular mass of gray into…what? Abstractions. Terms like reasoning and retrieval are used to indicate that a task typically involves more of one than the other, but the behavior itself is continuous. And there are many ways to slice the smoke to indicate cognition. (pp. 198–199)

For clarity, the tasks described here are related to the cognitive abilities that are most apparent. In their book CHC Cognitive-Achievement Relations: What We Have Learned from the Last 20 Years of Research (2010), McGrew and Wendling provide a synthesis of research that summarizes how these various CHC abilities are related to achievement.

Comprehension-Knowledge (Gc)

Comprehension-knowledge, also referred to as “crystallized intelligence,” is typically described as a combination of a person's language development and the general knowledge he has acquired through life experiences and education. As such, it can be strongly influenced by a person's culture and values.

Language development includes a person's ability to understand language (spoken or signed) and the ability to use language to express himself. Knowledge includes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts, or “knowing what”) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of procedures, or “knowing how to”). Examples of declarative knowledge include knowing math facts, rules of games, the location of India, the meaning of the word “rock” (and every other word meaning that a person knows), and why it is unsafe to swim in shark-infested water. Examples of procedural knowledge include such things as knowing how to drive a car, brush your teeth, apply math facts to solve an algebra problem, figure out the main idea of a passage in a book, or remove a spleen.

Knowledge and the ability to use language form the basis for new learning. People understand and retain new information more easily when they can relate it to something they already know. A person who has been to an aquarium or spends time near the ocean has a better foundation for understanding text or a lecture about marine life than the person who lives in a desert area and has no familiarity with marine life. A good fund of knowledge is also necessary for written expression. The more a person knows about a topic, the more information he can incorporate into a writing assignment.

Quantitative knowledge is a subset of comprehension-knowledge and includes all the information that a person knows about math, such as math facts and the concepts underlying math operations, algorithms, and algebraic formulas.

Comprehension-knowledge is organized, consolidated, and stored in long-term memory, “the mind's warehouse.”

Fluid Reasoning (Gf)

Fluid reasoning is the ability to be both deliberate and flexible in controlling one's mental processes to solve new or unfamiliar problems. When using fluid reasoning, the information and procedures a person has previously learned may be useful but are not always sufficient to solve the problem, and so the person must apply logical reasoning in addition to any available information.

Inductive and deductive reasoning are generally considered the best indicators of fluid reasoning ability, although quantitative reasoning is also an aspect of fluid reasoning.

Deductive reasoning is the ability to start with given rules or a general statement and proceed in a step-by-step fashion to figure out the solution to a problem. Some examples of deductive reasoning are:

• Solving an algebra problem using a known algorithm.
• Determining that if all crows are black, and a particular bird is white, then that bird is not a crow.
• You are given the problem: Two men bring a lion and a goat to a river. They have only one boat, which is small and can only carry one man and one animal at a time. How can both men and both animals reach the other side of the river without the lion eating the goat?

Inductive reasoning is the ability to perceive a pattern based on multiple observations or experiences and come up with a rule or generalization that explains them. Consequently, inductive reasoning is going from the specific to the general. Some examples of inductive reasoning are:

• The sun has come up every morning that I have been alive. I have never seen or read about a day in which the sun has not come up. Therefore, the sun comes up every morning.
• In a series of research studies, scientists found that women who took high levels of calcium with vitamin D had fewer heart attacks than those who took high levels of calcium without vitamin D. Based on these data, they hypothesized that vitamin D has properties that protect against heart disease.

Reasoning is important for all aspects of learning, in school and in life. At a basic level, a student uses inductive reasoning when noticing that both sit and sack start with the sound /s/ and then figures out that the letter s says /s/. The student uses deductive reasoning when recalling the rule “s between two vowels can say /s/ or /z/,” and applying it to sound out “rose.” Both inductive and deductive reasoning are key abilities in understanding the scientific method, the reasons for the start of World War II, and why prejudice against an entire race of people or religion makes no sense. A student uses reasoning when reading, writing a persuasive essay, or, while watching a video, inferring a character's motives for committing a crime.

Quantitative reasoning is the ability to reason with numbers, the mathematical relations among numbers, and different operations to solve problems. The content of the reasoning process is quantitative knowledge. Problems that come up in daily life, and that do not fit neatly into mathematical routines and procedures that a person already knows, require quantitative reasoning. Examples include figuring out the amount of carpet needed to carpet three rooms of varying sizes, or how to apply IRS rules to a company's taxes.

Short-Term Working Memory (Gwm)

A previous and widely held theory of memory is that short-term memory is a kind of holding pattern for information entering mental awareness; when other cognitive processes start to work on it, working memory takes over. Current theories of short-term memory hold that a person cannot maintain information in mental awareness without working with it. Even a task as simple as remembering a phone number for a few seconds requires some work (focusing attention on it and repeating it)—thus the more descriptive term, short-term working memory. Working memory capacity describes a person's ability to control attention, direct it to the information held in conscious awareness, and maintain it, while other cognitive abilities operate on the information. Using the phone number example, attention is focused on the string of digits while expressive language repeats it. Understood in this way, short-term working memory is a dynamic process, an operation performed on information, rather than a stable ability.

A critical distinction between short-term working memory and long-term memory is that short-term working memory is a dynamic process and long-term memory is a storage facility. As stated, information enters mental awareness through our senses or is retrieved from long-term memory. If no attention is directed toward it, the information dissipates immediately. Information is only available for conscious thought while short-term working memory is acting on it. When the process is completed and the information has been rearranged, combined with other information, or transformed in some way, it is either transferred to long-term memory for storage, or, if is no longer needed (e.g., you have dialed the phone number), attention is withdrawn, and it dissipates.

Short-term working memory is limited in capacity (the amount of information it can work on simultaneously) and duration (the amount of time before the information is lost); consequently, people whose mental processes can operate on the information quickly are at an advantage. Processing speed, then, acts as a catalyst for short-term working memory (discussed later). Some examples of the use of short-term working memory are:

• Working the steps of a long division problem while simultaneously retrieving...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.1.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Test in der Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: Assessment • Bildungswesen • Education • Education Special Topics • Psychologie • Psychologische Gutachten • Psychologisches Gutachten • Psychology • Spezialthemen Bildungswesen
• ISBN-10: 1-118-86070-5 / 1118860705
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-86070-0 / 9781118860700