Educational Therapy Flashcards

During a structured literacy session, a CALT is working with a student who consistently substitutes visually similar graphemes (e.g., 'b' for 'd') despite months of intervention. The therapist suspects the issue is not visual processing but rather a deficit in which underlying area?

Answer: Phonological awareness and phoneme-grapheme mapping automaticity

Letter reversals in older students who have received instruction are most reliably linked to incomplete phoneme-grapheme mapping automaticity rather than visual processing deficits. Research consistently shows that 'b/d' confusion reflects a failure to anchor the letter's identity to its phoneme, not a vision problem. Strengthening the auditory-articulatory-kinesthetic link for /b/ and /d/ resolves the confusion more reliably than visual discrimination drills.

A CALT administering a norm-referenced phonological processing battery notes that a 14-year-old student scores at the 18th percentile on Phoneme Segmentation Fluency but at the 62nd percentile on Phonological Memory. Which intervention hierarchy best reflects evidence-based practice for this profile?

Answer: Prioritize segmentation and manipulation tasks before advancing to multisyllabic decoding work

Phoneme segmentation fluency is a foundational skill for accurate and automatic decoding, especially for multisyllabic words. Despite adequate phonological memory (which supports new word learning), a segmentation deficit at the 18th percentile indicates the student cannot reliably parse phoneme sequences — a prerequisite skill. The structured literacy hierarchy requires this foundational phoneme manipulation skill to be consolidated before complex decoding tasks are prioritized.

An educational therapist is preparing a treatment plan for a student with a confirmed phonological dyslexia profile who shows unexpected relative strength in orthographic pattern recognition. Which of the following advanced instructional modifications is MOST consistent with leveraging this profile while still remediating the core deficit?

Answer: Use whole-word orthographic mapping of high-frequency irregular words as an entry point while systematically building phoneme-grapheme correspondences through explicit instruction

Orthographic mapping theory (Ehri) holds that sight words are stored through phoneme-grapheme connections, not visual memorization. For a student with phonological dyslexia but intact orthographic pattern recognition, the therapist can strategically use that orthographic awareness as a scaffold — anchoring irregular high-frequency words through systematic phoneme-grapheme analysis — while explicitly remediating the phonological core deficit. The other options risk building compensatory strategies that bypass rather than remediate the underlying deficit.

A CALT is conducting a progress monitoring session and notices that a student's oral reading accuracy has plateaued at 94% on decodable texts but decoding of nonsense words remains at the 22nd percentile. The student's reading comprehension is grade-level when text is read aloud. Which conclusion is MOST defensible?

Answer: The student is relying on context and partial phonological cues rather than full alphabetic decoding, indicating incomplete consolidation of the alphabetic principle

A student reading at 94% accuracy on decodable texts while scoring at the 22nd percentile on nonsense word decoding is a classic sign of context-assisted partial decoding — the student is using meaning and initial/final phoneme cues to guess unfamiliar words rather than fully applying the alphabetic principle. Grade-level listening comprehension confirms the deficit is specifically in decoding, not language comprehension. This profile requires continued systematic phonics intervention, not graduation to comprehension work.

When applying the Orton-Gillingham approach to a student who demonstrates mastery of closed-syllable and vowel-consonant-e syllable types but has persistent difficulty with vowel team syllables, the MOST appropriate next instructional decision according to structured syllabication principles is to:

Answer: Sequence vowel team instruction by introducing the most phonemically predictable digraphs first (e.g., 'ai,' 'ay') before addressing teams with multiple sounds (e.g., 'ea')

Structured literacy syllabication instruction sequences new patterns by predictability and frequency. Within vowel team syllables, digraphs with a single reliable pronunciation (ai/ay → /ā/) are introduced before teams with variant sounds (ea → /ē/ or /ĕ/). This reduces cognitive load during initial acquisition and adheres to the O-G principle of moving from simple-to-complex within a pattern category. Introducing all teams simultaneously or embedding them only in multisyllabic words violates the explicit, systematic sequencing principle.

A CALT reviewing a psychoeducational report sees that a 16-year-old student's processing speed index score is at the 8th percentile while verbal comprehension and fluid reasoning are both above the 75th percentile. The student's written expression is two grade levels below expectation. Which of the following instructional accommodations is MOST aligned with the neuropsychological profile rather than the academic deficit alone?

Answer: Extended time and keyboarding instruction to reduce transcription demand, allowing higher-order composition skills to emerge

A severe processing speed deficit with high verbal and fluid reasoning creates a specific bottleneck at the transcription level — the student's ideation and linguistic knowledge far exceed their ability to get words onto paper quickly. Extended time addresses the speed constraint directly, while keyboarding instruction reduces the motor-to-symbol translation load. The other options address writing quality (traits model), word-level encoding (spelling), or bypass the skill entirely (oral substitution) without targeting the specific processing speed bottleneck identified in the profile.