As of Monday (of this week) I hadn't heard from the First Steps about the questionnaire I had filled out for Miles so I called the person listed at the bottom of the letter, the District Child Evaluation Specialist. She went over the results of the questionnaire, the Ages & Stages Questionnaire (ASQ-3), with me and told me that he was below the cutoff in several areas and because of this qualified for the full developmental evaluation.
Today (Wednesday) I received a letter from the person I spoke with and it contained further information about the results. Of the five areas scored in the evaluation we did (Communication, Problem Solving, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, and Personal Social), he was "below the established cutoffs" in Problem Solving, Gross Motor, and Fine Motor. This is a bit confusing to me, given that our major concerns are about his communication and social skills (and that whole crazy letter fascination thing).
I did my own research about the scoring of the ASQ-3 and figured out his scores:
- Communication - 45 points (out of 60 possible) (cutoff score is 25.36)
- Gross Motor - 40 points (out of 60 possible) (cutoff score is 34.80)
- Fine Motor - 25 points (out of 60 possible) (cutoff score is 12.28)
- Problem Solving - 30 points (out of 60 possible) (cutoff score is 26.92)
- Personal-Social - 40 points (out of 60 possible) (cutoff score is 28.96)
So it seems to me that he isn't technically below the cutoff in those areas, but he is in the shaded area (close to cutoff) in all but Communication. After those scored questions there are open-ended questions for the parents to answer and on several questions, my answers must have flagged some concern. For instance, Question #2 asks "Do you think your child talks like other toddlers her ages? If no, explain." I said No and wrote "No use of pronouns, very caveman-like. Repeats words and phrases we say, very little spontaneous language. Doesn't seem to understand many questions."
Perhaps the final decision of hers to refer us on for the developmental evaluation was based more on my responses at the end plus his scores being close to the cutoffs. I still don't understand how he had such fabulous scores on the Communication section...?
Anyway, we are now waiting for a call from the Early Intervention (EI) office in our county to schedule our intake appointment where we will fill out paperwork, learn about the First Steps program, and answer some questions about Miles. They will then schedule our in-home evaluation with a chosen evaluator.
I'm not really sure what to think about this latest information but I guess the important thing is that the full evaluation should shed a little bit of light on what kind of services he could benefit from in the Early Invervention program, so I'm looking forward to that.
3 comments:
Well, since he did qualify for a full developmental evaluation, you should get more in depth info about his communication skills once that is completed. I don't know much about First Steps. Are they sending one professional and giving one evaluation with different parts or are they sending a speech pathologist to do a speech eval, OT for fine motor, PT for gross motor, etc?
Yay, I was hoping you would chime in here! :)
I believe they just send one evaluator to look at all aspects. They said something about that they would choose the evaluator after our intake appointment.
Gotcha. Every once in a while we will need to do a transition meeting from First Steps into preschool and it seems now that I do remember them saying they give one evaluation to identify weaknesses over all areas.
Keep us updated on the results!
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