Which kid?

Today was our 6 month review with our ABA provider. It has technically been 5 months since the last assessment and 8 months total of therapy. In December, we had a glowing review and were basically told that it's too soon to tell but that things were going as well as they could possibly go at that point. After 5 full months of living and breathing therapy and our external evaluation last week, I didn't expect quite as positive of a review today. I was honestly pretty nervous about what they were going to say.

One thing hasn't really changed. It's still too soon to tell. While B is clearly not on track in all measures (and in fact, quite far off the mark on some), he is excelling in others. I guess it's good that they use more than one method to analyze his progress and ultimate prognosis. On the other hand, it makes it a little tough to know how to feel about it all.

I'll start with the positives. He gained 17 new skills since the last interval (an increase of 80%). He's learning! There are 862 skills in total and he is up to um, 30 but he is accelerating rapidly. He has mastered over 1,300 of his objectives in his weekly programming. His success rate was 94%. He's learning a lot... he just had such a lot to learn! When viewing his videotape assessment with me, they were very encouraged by the difference in the quality of his vocals. He seems to be verging on the next phase of language - with much more intonation and communicative babble with occasional words thrown in vs. stimulatory jargon. He is also on track to master all 4 of his benchmark objectives for this interval of therapy.

His learning assessment standardized testing was also pretty positive. His developmental age in December was 6.4 months; today it was 14.1 (1.6 months of development for every month of therapy). This is really encouraging... if he can accelerate his rate of development, than he can eventually catch up to his peers. His IQ equivalent (since true IQ is impossible to measure at this point) shot up from 18 to 34. In Lovaas' original studies, the IQ needed to be above 30 to eventually reach recovery so he's in the range now. Even at this rate though, he would not be ready for Kindergarten until at least 2014.

Where it's not such a shining review is in his Early Learning Measurement Assessment. He has recently mastered 3 new skills on this test but there are 10 total and it is one of the predictors of best outcome. In the original study, kids were able to master this in 5 months of therapy or by 3.5 years of age. So, B missed that one. Nothing is clear-cut though. In his most recent assessment, he picked up 3 skills and they were ones that were not taught so he learned them incidentally. We'll keep an eye on this test in the next few months.  It focuses on things that are big weaknesses for B: motor and vocal imitation and expressive and receptive language. So it's not a huge surprise that he didn't ace it.

Also, where they have to choose where he is headed based on all of today's data, they selected significantly making progress rather than the options that say he is on track for best outcome. This is discouraging but we can't rule it out yet. I'm so, so hopeful that we'll be checking that best outcome box in the next review.

In summary, B is doing fantastic in therapy but we don't yet know if he's doing as well as he could be from an outcome standpoint. He's making significant progress but it's not as quickly as we'd like. We were shown 2 graphs of progression. Both were similar to where B is today but one jumped up in all areas and the other did not. We can't yet say for sure which of these kids B is going to be. We are sure hoping for the kid who "catches up". We have a kid with some serious potential here. The only thing we do know for sure is that we have a lot more of this ahead of us. A lot more time. A lot more sacrifice. A lot more intensity. And hopefully a lot more progress.