Writing Useful, Accessible, and Legally Defensible Psychoeducational Reports

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Why Is Another Book on Report Writing Needed?

Report Writing Is Important

Assessment and Report Writing Consumes a Lot of Our Time and Is a Fundamental Task for School Psychologists

Reports Should Clearly Communicate Information to Consumers That Makes a Difference in the Lives of the Children Involved

Chapter 2: What Makes a Report Legally Defensible?

Understand the Difference Between What Legally Must Be Included in Your Reports and What Must Be True About Your Assessment

What Must Be True About Your Evaluations (and Therefore Reflected in Your Reports) According to Federal Legal Mandate?

The Evaluation Should Be Comprehensive

The Evaluator Should Use a Variety of Assessment Tools or Approaches That Gather Functional and Relevant Data

The Evaluation Should Be Fair

The Evaluator Should Be Competent

The Procedures Used Should Be Valid and Reliable

Chapter 3: How Do I Make My Reports More Useful to Consumers?

Write Your Report with the Audience in Mind

Useful Reports Clearly Answer the Referral Questions

Useful Reports Focus on Strengths as Well as Needs

Useful Reports Provide Concrete and Feasible Recommendations for Educational Planning

Useful Reports Are Clear and Understandable

Readability Impacts the Usefulness of Your Reports

Increase Readability by Reducing Professional Jargon

Increase the Readability of Psychoeducational Reports by Cutting Words and Using Active Voice

Increase the Readability of Psychoeducational Reports by Considering the Length, Including Amount and Quality of Information

Increase the Readability of Your Report by Using a Report Structure That Integrates Data and Highlights Relevant Evaluation Findings

Referral-Based Reports Synthesize Fundamental Research Findings with Best Practice

Chapter 4: Step-by-Step, How Do I Write Useful and Legally Defensible Reports?

How Do I Clearly Communicate the Purpose of the Evaluation?

How Do I Develop Well-Formed Evaluation Questions?

How Do I Write Present Levels of Functioning Questions?

How Do I Write Diagnostic or Disability Questions?

How Do I Write Solution-Based, or What Do We Do About This Questions?

The Background Information Provides Developmental and Educational Perspective to Your Report

Assessment Data from Multiple Sources Is Integrated into Themes

How Do I Write Useful Recommendations?

Chapter 5: How Do I Solve Practical Problems Along the Way to Question-Driven Report Writing?

Remind Me: Why Is Another Book on Report Writing Needed?

Why Should I Change My Report Writing Model?

What Should Be My First Steps Toward Transitioning to This Report Style?

My School District or Agency Already Has a Template That We Are Required to Use; How Can I Work Within These Constraints?

This Style of Report Writing Seems Time Consuming and I Am Already Swamped with Work! Is This True?

Do Referral-Based Reports Vary, Depending on the Characteristics of the Child?

Do Triennial Reevaluations Differ from Other Reports?

How Do Charts and Tables Fit into a Questions-Based Thematic Report?

Do I Need to Use a Specific Format When Writing?

Last Words

Appendix I–Checklist for a Useful and Legally Defensible Report

Appendix II–What Do These Reports Look Like?

Appendix III–Interview protocol

References

Author Index

Subject Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 4.1 Evaluation Cycle

Figure 4.2 Integration of Information in Response to Evaluation Question

Figure 4.3 Thinking Through Recommendations

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Does My Assessment Contain Functional Information About the Student’s Skill?

Table 2.2 Does My Assessment Contain Functional Information About the Student’s Skill?

Table 2.3 Does My Assessment Contain Relevant Information About the Student’s Skill?

Table 2.4 Does My Assessment Contain Relevant Information About the Student’s Skill?

Table 3.1 Incorporating Strengths as Well as Needs into an Evaluation

Table 3.2 If Your Headings Look Like This . . .

Table 4.1 Disability Categories in IDEA 2004

Table 4.2 Related Services in IDEA 2004

WRITING USEFUL, ACCESSIBLE, AND LEGALLY DEFENSIBLE PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL REPORTS

MICHAEL R. HASS

JEANNE ANNE M. CARRIERE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Hass, Michael R.

Writing useful, accessible, and legally defensible psychoeducational reports / Michael R. Hass, Ph.D., Jeanne Anne M. Carriere, Ph.D.—1

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-20565-5 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-82494-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-85239-2 (ebk)

1. Individualized education programs. 2. Report writing. 3. Children with disabilities—Education—Evaluation. I. Carriere, Jeanne Anne M. II. Title.

LC4019.H384 2014

371.2—dc23

2013044598

For our students: Your intelligence, commitment, and tolerance for ambiguity continually inspire us to be the best practitioners and professors we can be.

—MH & JAC

For my trinity of mentors: Steven Hodge for lighting the fire, Judy McBride for providing the fuel, and Michael Hass for modeling containment and escalation methods for a long and memorable burn.

—JAC

Acknowledgments

We feel a great deal of gratitude for the family, friends, and colleagues who have supported us through this process. Thank you to our editor, Marquita Flemming, who initially proposed this book. Her vision, patience, and guidance have been our driving force.

A big thank-you to Patricia Harriman and our Wiley editing crew. We are also indebted to our colleagues, Kelly Kennedy and John Brady, who provided lightning-fast comments and critique. This is a better book because of all their efforts.

A special thank-you to all of our colleagues in the Counseling and School Psychology Program, whose collegiality, support, and wicked sense of humor keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

Michael would like to thank Gabrielle for her faith in his abilities and for always meeting the statement I have to work on the book with encouragement and support.

Jeanne Anne thanks her husband, Steve, and daughters, Lila and Scarlett, for their understanding of her recent long hours and their loving encouragement when deadlines loomed. She would also like to thank her parents, who have always been her biggest supporters.

Finally, we thank our readers. We sincerely hope you will find this book useful.

Chapter 1

Why Is Another Book on Report Writing Needed?

Jeanne Anne’s husband is a teacher. Early in their relationship, as she was spending her Saturday afternoon writing psychoeducational reports, he flippantly asked, Why are you spending so much time on those? Nobody reads them anyway. At the time, her frustration hindered her ability to engage in a meaningful conversation about his opinion, probably because at some level she knew he was correct. She truly had become a gatekeeper on the way to Special Education services and her report was simply a step to be completed. It had no purpose other than to sit in a file. A seed was planted, and what would become a professional journey to improve the usefulness of her reports began. Along the way she met Michael, whose journey probably began on a much less dramatic note. He was spending a lot of time and effort on his assessments, had important to things to say, and wanted people to read his reports and consider his recommendations.

This book is the result of our efforts both as practitioners to write better reports and as educators to teach others to do so as well. Our goal for our students and ourselves is to write reports that represent children and their needs in a way that is useful to the stakeholders involved with those children, especially parents and teachers. Recognizing that special education has become increasingly litigious, we also want those reports to reflect the ethical and legal demands and constraints put upon us by our professional standards as well as state and federal laws and regulations. Our position is that we can accomplish both and it is not necessary to sacrifice usefulness and accessibility to meet legal and ethical mandates. We take this a step further and argue that making our reports more accessible and useful to consumers will itself make them more ethical and legally compliant.

We have written and read many psychological reports during careers that between us span over 40 years of experience as practitioners and 26 years as trainers of school psychologists. During that time, we estimate that we have written over a thousand psychological reports and read at least that many of our students’ reports. As university trainers, we have also read reports from dozens of local school districts. Things have changed considerably over our careers. When Jeanne Anne began her first school psychology job in 1993, she created handwritten reports using a three-page template, essentially a psychological fill-in-the-blank format. When Michael began his career, several years before Jeanne Anne, his reports were also handwritten, but the fill-in-the-blank template was only two pages long. It is clear to us that these early efforts at representing children in a written document contained very little information that was useful to parents or educators. Currently, we work in an area of the country where 30- to 50-page reports based on highly detailed templates is the norm. Unfortunately, we often find these much longer documents still do not contain much that is truly useful to parents and teachers.

A few years ago, we took the ideas we had developed as practitioners and trainers and created a workshop that we then presented at local, state, and national conferences. To our surprise, these workshops were often filled to capacity, frequently with people sitting on the floor around the edges of the room. This taught us that although practitioners write many reports, they are not necessarily confident in their skills. We also discovered that practitioners write reports with a striking range of formats and lengths.

We have noted a trend toward writing longer, less comprehensible reports in the name of legal defensiveness. We believe that most of these reports have several problems that hinder their usefulness to readers and actually make them less legally defensible. For example, they often lack focus and cohesiveness, have little actual interpretation, do not provide useful recommendations, and use vocabulary that only professionals with graduate degrees could possibly understand. They are also typically full of boilerplate legal language that does not appear to serve any useful purpose, including that of making the assessment or report more legally defensive. In addition to this legal filler language, a concerned parent or teacher often has to wade through many vague and generic statements that could be about nearly any child assessed to discover useful information unique to the specific child they are concerned about.

One goal in writing this book is to push back against this trend. We challenge the notion that longer is better and that the way we conduct our assessments and write reports should be guided by fear of legal action. Simply put, we believe that an assessment that directly responds to the concerns of parents and teachers and a report that communicates the results of that assessment in a way that the reader can easily understand is not only best practice but also easier to legally defend than the 40- or 50-page monster reports we often see. This book represents our current best thinking about how to accomplish this. As we explain in detail later in the book, the model we propose is based on a synthesis of published research, an analysis of professional guidelines, reflections on our own experience writing reports and teaching report writing, and what one of our colleagues calls PJs (professional judgments).

In this book, we advocate for question-driven assessments and suggest that these questions serve to frame reports. In that spirit, we have structured the book in the same way. Each chapter begins with a question. For example, the title of this chapter is Why is another book on report writing needed? Following that, we have a series of sections and subsections that we conceptualize as follow-up questions and themes. Theme statements are concise statements that summarize the major finding of the information that follows. This also follows the structure we advocate for reports. In Chapter 1, the themes include: (a) Report writing is important; (b) Assessment and report writing consumes a lot of our time and is a fundamental task of school psychologists; and (c) Reports should clearly communicate important information to consumers that makes a difference in the lives of the children involved.

We have used many examples to illustrate our points throughout this book, including six sample reports in Appendix II. To preserve the confidentiality of those involved, we have changed all identifying information and used pseudonyms for the personal names, schools, school districts, and agencies discussed. To retain a level of authenticity, some examples contain actual assessment instruments. By including them in our examples, we are not endorsing or opposing the use of these instruments.

Report Writing Is Important

Throughout this book, we will discuss assessment as well as report writing. The reason for this is that the two cannot be separated. As succinctly stated by Brown-Chidsey and Steege, No assessment is likely to be useful until, or unless, the findings are communicated to those in a position to implement solutions (2005, p. 267). The value of a well-designed and focused assessment is easily obscured by a poorly organized and written report and, conversely, a poorly designed assessment cannot be rescued by a beautifully written report. School psychology graduate programs pay considerable attention to assessment but, if judged by the practitioners who attend our workshops, less attention to report writing.

Assessment can be defined as the process of gathering information to inform decisions (Salvia, Ysseldyke, & Bolt, 2007). No matter your philosophy about what constitutes a valid or useful assessment, the process involves collecting and evaluating data for the purpose of responding to stakeholders’ questions and concerns, identifying needs and strengths, and making meaningful recommendations. These data are also used to make decisions regarding further assessment, diagnosis or disability classification, and instructional planning (Salvia, Ysseldyke, & Bolt, 2007; Sattler, 1992).

We argue that report writing is a critical yet undervalued part of the evaluation process. Unfortunately, practitioners often view report writing as a perfunctory post-assessment task. The report is sometimes completed the night before or even minutes before a meeting, without giving team members, including parents, the opportunity to review the findings before making critical decisions about the student’s education. Although they are frequently not given the same attention as other aspects of the assessment process, psychological reports are important because they become the basis for the multidisciplinary teams’ decisions regarding eligibility for special education and the foundation for recommending services and intervention. In other words, reports guide all of the decisions and planning that follow an assessment.

Assessment and Report Writing Consumes a Lot of Our Time and Is a Fundamental Task for School Psychologists

School psychology is a relatively young profession. Fagan and Wise (2000) conceptually divided the developmental history of school psychology into two eras. The first era, approximately the end of the 19th century to midway through the 20th century, was marked by widespread school reform. Early-20th-century political and sociocultural influences, specifically compulsory education laws, the corresponding increase in public school enrollment, and the development of intelligence testing, opened the door for the quantification of learning and achievement. This set the stage for the standardization of children’s progress in school (Cook, 1912; Frey, 2005; National Conference of State Legislators, 2007). During this period, many types of educational and psychological practitioners provided services within the school setting. These services typically focused on assessment and diagnosis of learning difficulties.

The second era, midcentury to present, has seen the development of school psychologists’ professional identity and an expansion of specialized training programs. For the first time, the majority of professionals practicing as school psychologists were trained in programs specifically designed for school psychologists. Throughout both of these eras, psychological assessment, diagnosis, and specialized program placement were the dominant roles of school psychologists (Fagan, 1990).

The results of several surveys of practitioners done over the last 40 years reflect this conclusion. In 1970, Farling and Hoedt (1971) conducted the first nationwide survey of school psychologists with the goal of identifying issues, concerns, and trends in the field. Their findings suggest that at that time the roles and functions of school psychologists were largely defined by assessment-related activities such as student evaluations, report writing, and parent–teacher meetings.

With the 1975 passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (i.e., Public Law 94-142), it became public policy to educate children with disabilities at the public’s expense. PL 94-142 guaranteed parents of students with disabilities the right to be actively involved in their child’s educational planning. They had the right to request assessment and, for the first time, had access to their children’s records, including psychological reports (Weddig, 1984). Opinions regarding the impact this would have on the practice of school psychology were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Some thought the legislation would lead to more time spent on testing and other assessment activities while others predicted that it would lead to more opportunities for an expanded model of practice (Goldwasser, Meyers, Christenson, & Graden, 1983).

Eight years after the passing of PL 94-142, Goldwasser, Meyers, Christenson, and Graden (1983) undertook a national survey investigating school psychologists’ perceptions of the legislation’s impact on their roles. Respondents answered questions regarding evaluation procedures, Individualized Education Program (IEP) team membership, changes in role and function, due process participation, future training needs, and overall effects of the legislation. Two factors had negative implications for the psychologists’ ability to engage in a broader range of services: an increased focus on students with disabilities, leading to limited opportunities to engage in preventative measures; and an increase in paperwork and administrative tasks, also reducing the time to engage in a wider range of professional activities. Surprisingly, the researchers found that the legislation had minimal impact on the overall roles of the respondents. School psychologists still spent the majority of their time engaged in diagnostic evaluations and related activities.

Researchers found similar survey results over the next 20 years. Smith (1984) surveyed a nationwide, random sample