The Winston School
Testing and Evaluation Center
GLOSSARY
Accommodation: Techniques and materials that allow individuals with LD to complete school or work tasks with greater ease and effectiveness. Examples include assistive technology (e.g., computers, spellcheckers, tape recorders) and extended time for completing assignments and tests.
Age Equivalent Score: An individual child's score is described as being the same as students that are younger, the same age, or older than that student (e.g. a 9 year old student my receive the same score that an average 13 year old student does, suggesting that this student is quite advanced); however, it is not as a reliable score as standard scores or percentiles.
Assistive Technology: Equipment that enhances the ability of individuals to be more efficient and successful.
Attention Deficit /Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Developmentally inappropriate behavior, including poor attention skills, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. A person can be predominantly inattentive (often referred to as ADD), predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, or a combination of these two.
Auditory Issues:
§ Auditory Discrimination: Ability to detect differences in sounds; may be gross ability, such as detecting the differences between the noises made by a cat and dog, or fine ability, such as detecting the differences made by the sounds of letters "m" and "n."
§ Auditory Processing: An inability to accurately process and interpret sound information. Students with these difficulties often do not recognize subtle differences between sounds in words. Individuals with profound processing and discrimination difficulties have…
§ Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD): A disorder that occurs when the ear and the brain do not coordinate fully. It affects the ability to separate a meaningful message from non-essential background sound and/or processing certain sounds within words, causing difficulty in understanding orally-presented information.
§ Auditory Figure-Ground: Ability to attend to one sound against a background of sound (e.g., hearing the teacher's voice against classroom noise).
Automaticity: General term that refers to any skilled and complex behavior that can be performed rather easily with little attention, effort, or conscious awareness. Students who have become automatic at word recognition can retrieve words from memory and are able to focus attention on constructing meaning from the text, rather than decoding.
Context Clues: Context clues may be drawn from the immediate sentence containing the word, from text already read, from pictures accompanying the text, or from definitions, restatements, examples, or descriptions in the text.
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Decoding (aka word decoding, basic reading skill): The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences. It is also the act of deciphering a new word by sounding it out.
Developmental Spelling: The use of letter-sound relationship information to attempt to write words (also called invented spelling)
Direct Instruction: An instructional approach to academic subjects that emphasizes the use of carefully sequenced steps that include demonstration, modeling, guided practice, and independent application.
Disinhibition: Difficulty behaving appropriately in an automatic way (i.e., laughing at the wrong time, interrupting others’ conversations frequently); problem with self-governing skills.
Divergent Thinking: Ability to generate new and unusual ideas or alternative solutions to a problem
Dyscalculia: A severe difficulty in understanding and using symbols or functions needed for success in mathematics.
Dysgraphia: A severe difficulty in producing handwriting that is legible and written at an age-appropriate speed.
Dyslexia: Dyslexia is manifested by difficulties in acquiring age/grade appropriate skills in reading, writing and spelling. It may also be referred to as a reading disability, reading difference, or reading disorder.
Dysnomia (aka word retrieval, nominal recall, tip-of-the-tongue syndrome): A marked difficulty in remembering names or recalling words needed for oral or written language.
Dysphasia: Confusion in or inefficiency in one’s ability to understand and/or express oneself through language (written and/or spoken).
Dyspraxia: A severe difficulty in performing drawing, writing, buttoning, and other tasks requiring fine motor skill, or in sequencing the necessary movements. It is also described as motor planning.
Encoding: Spelling - translating information into written communication.
Experiential “see-do” Visual-Spatial Learning: performs best when actively involved in the learning process by direct observation and interaction.
Expressive Language: The aspect of spoken language that includes speaking and the aspect of written language that includes composing or writing.
Freedom from Distractibility: Trouble staying focused long enough to complete sequential tasks.
Frustration Tolerance: Ability to control behavior when faced with increasing social or academic demands or pressures.
Gertsman Syndrome: Disorder of sequencing and ordering information affecting written spelling, paper/pencil math and general organization.
Grade Equivalent scores: An individual child's score is described as being the same as students that are in higher, the same, or lower grades than that student (e.g. a student in 2nd grade my earn the same score that an average fourth grade student does, suggesting that this student is quite advanced); however, it is not as a reliable as standard scores or percentiles.
Grapheme: A letter or letter combination that spells a single phoneme. In English, a grapheme may be one, two, three, or four letters, such as e, ei, igh, or eigh.
Graphic Organizers: Text, diagram or other pictorial device that summarizes and illustrates interrelationships among concepts in a text. Graphic organizers are often known as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ): A measure of someone's cognitive ability as indicated by an intelligence test, where an average score is 100. An IQ score is the ratio of a person's mental age to his chronological age multiplied by 100.
Learning Disability (LD): A learning disability is a neurological disorder. In simple terms, a learning disability results from a difference in the way a person's brain is "wired." Individuals with learning disabilities are of average to the very superior range of intelligence. They may have difficulty with reading, writing, math, language, reasoning, recalling and/or organizing information if left to figure things out by themselves or if taught in conventional ways.
Learning Strategies and Study Skills: Techniques used by students to help them learn and structure new information in an independent manner without the constant direction of the teacher.
Lipreader: Watches the speaker’s lips closely – usually to compensate for receptive language or auditory processing difficulties.
Listening comprehension: Understanding and remembering orally-presented information.
Math Fluency: The ability to solve addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems quickly.
Memory: Auditory Memory: Ability to retain information which has been presented orally; may be short term memory, such as recalling information presented several seconds before; long term memory, such as recalling information presented more than a minute before; or sequential memory, such as recalling a series of information in proper order.
Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking; to develop effective strategies to figure things out – “thinking about thinking”.
Mnemonic Aides: Techniques or acronyms to assist in memorization.
Mood Lability: Tendency to change moods quickly; trouble modulating or maintaining even mood.
Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language. A morpheme can be one syllable (book) or more than one syllable (seventeen). It can be a whole word or a part of a word such as a prefix or suffix. For example, the word ungrateful contains three morphemes: un, grate, and ful.
Morphology: The study of how the aspects of language structure are related to the ways words are formed from prefixes, roots, and suffixes (e.g., mis-spell-ing), and how words are related to each other.
Multisensory Teaching: An educational approach that uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile cues simultaneously to enhance memory and learning. Links are consistently made between the visual (what we see), auditory (what we hear), and kinesthetic-tactile (what we feel) pathways in learning to read and spell.
Nonverbal Learning Disability: A neurological disorder which originates in the right hemisphere of the brain. Reception of nonverbal or performance-based information governed by this hemisphere is impaired in varying degrees, causing problems with visual-spatial, intuitive, organizational, evaluative, and holistic processing functions.
Orthographic Knowledge: The understanding that the sounds in a language are represented by written or printed symbols.
Orton-Gillingham Approach: A multisensory approach to remediating dyslexia created by Dr. Samuel Orton, a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, and Anna Gillingham, an educator and psychologist.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of speech that serves to distinguish one utterance from another in a language.
Phonemic Awareness: The ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. An example of how beginning readers show us they have phonemic awareness is combining or blending the separate sounds of a word to say the word (/c/ /a/ /t/ – cat).
Phonics: A form of instruction to cultivate the understanding and use of the alphabetic principle; that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds in spoken language) and graphemes, the letters that represent those sounds in written language, and that this information can be used to read or decode words.
Phonological Awareness: A range of understandings related to the sounds of words and word parts, including identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language such as words, syllables, and onset and rime. It also includes phonemic awareness as well as other aspects of spoken language such as rhyming and syllabication.
Pragmatics: Ability to approach language in a practical and logical sequence (e.g., requesting/ receiving information, expressing feelings). People with very poor verbal pragmatics may use inappropriate language for the listener and tend to “misread” others’ words or actions.
Print Awareness: Basic knowledge about print and how it is typically organized on a page. For example, print conveys meaning, print is read left to right, and words are separated by spaces.
Problem Solving: the ability to “think” through and relate information in new and unique ways.
Procedural Knowledge: The “how-to” knowledge needed to access information (or come up with a correct answer) quickly and efficiently.
Prosody: The ability to read the meaning in the melodic quality or tone of voice of others (receptive) and give off meaning through melodic quality and tone of one’s own voice (expressive). The variations in the melodic quality of the voice are the result of pitch, rhythm and stress. Poor prosody results in poor communication.
Reading Comprehension: The reason for reading: understanding what is read by reading actively (making sense from text) and with purpose (for learning, understanding, or enjoyment).
Reading Disability: Reading skills are significantly below what is normal considering the student’s age, intelligence, and education. The poor reading skills cause problems with the student's academic success and/or other important areas in life. Signs associated with reading disorder include: poor recognition of the written word; very slow oral reading; many mistakes in oral reading; and very poor comprehension of what has been read. It is sometimes referred to as Dyslexia.
Reading Fluency: The ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression and comprehension. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding words, they can focus their attention on what the text means.
Receptive Language: The aspect of spoken language that includes listening, and the aspect of written language that includes reading.
Selective Attention: Ability to select appropriate information from a visual or auditory field.
Self-Advocacy: The development of specific skills and understandings that enable children and adults to explain their specific learning disabilities to others and cope positively with the attitudes of peers, parents, teachers, and employers.
Self-Monitoring
The mental act of knowing when one does and does not understand what one is reading.
Semantic Organizers
Graphic organizers that look somewhat like a spider web where lines connect a central concept to a variety of related ideas and events.
Sequential Ordering: Ability to remember and repeat a series of symbols or instructions - either visually or auditorily.
Sequential Processing Style: knowing how and where to add bits and pieces to create a whole. Can assemble and take apart ideas, letters in words, words in sentences and paragraphs; has good temporal sequential skills (sense of time).
Sight Words
Words that a reader recognizes without having to sound them out. Some sight words are "irregular," or have letter-sound relationships that are uncommon. Some examples of sight words are you, are, have and said.
Simultaneous Processing Style: Looks at the ‘whole’ first. Person is an “Aha” thinker, gets the concept but has trouble telling you how; has good visual spatial skills; is often adept at repairing things or may be artistic.
Subvocalizes: Whispering word when reading or reasoning through problems.
Symbol Language Skills: Reading, spelling, arithmetic, printing and writing (symbols: letters and numbers).
Syntax: Grammar, or the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences.
Temporal Sequential Abilities: Ability to determine time and time related concepts often affecting math and test anxiety.
Temporal Spatial Abilities: Ability to organize and manage one’s “space”.
Testing the Limits: A probing technique used in testing where an examiner deviates from standard procedure to help determine how the student may have come to a conclusion. This technique may also be utilized in the classroom to determine student problem solving skills.
Vigilance or Sustained Attention: Ability to monitor incoming information over an extended period of time.
Visual Tracking: Ability to track symbols efficiently and quickly often affecting reading rate.
Vocabulary (aka word knowledge).
§ Listening vocabulary refers to the words a person knows when hearing them in oral speech. Speaking vocabulary refers to the words we use when we speak.
§ Reading vocabulary refers to the words a person knows when seeing them in print.
§ Writing vocabulary refers to the words we use in writing.
Word Attack (aka phonetic knowledge application)
An aspect of reading instruction that includes intentional strategies for learning to decode, sight read, and recognizing written words.
Writing Fluency
The ability to formulate and write simple sentences quickly when provided with word and picture prompts.
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