I just finished writing up the days activities for “Annie” when I meet with her in an hour. This gives me time to write a little about her cognitive testing that I completed back in March, when she was just over 11 years old.

PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement), a program by Learning Rx, includes a cognitive screening to be administered by licensed providers both pre- and post-training. The subtests, which look nothing like the training, include:
- Processing speed, to perform relatively easy mental tasks quickly
- Working memory, to store, retain, and retrieve information
- Visual processing, to picture, manipulate, organize, comprehend, and think with visual information
- Word attack, to know and apply the sound codes in order to pronounce unknown words
- Auditory analysis, to blend, segment, discriminate, and analyze speech sounds within a spoken pattern
- Logic and reasoning, to reason and solve spatially defined problems which require high level conceptual abilities
- Selective attention, to attend to a single visual stimulus with other competing stimuli present

PACE providers must guarantee at least a 2 year increase in any deficient area after 3 months of training. I usually get much better than that; typically 3 to 5 years in several areas, probably because of using the Pyramid of Potential model, as opposed to solely PACE.

How did Annie do? She did so well on the visual portion of the test, that she maxed out with the score of an average 18 year old, and 6.9 years above age level. In other words, gifted. Her Processing speed score was right at age level. However, her memory was low, with both auditory memory and visual memory being low. Her word attack score was about a nine-year-old level, while her ability to analyze sounds was extremely poor. She could not process the vowel sounds, so for example when I asked her to give me the sounds in the word pig, she said “puh” “ahh” “guh”. Her logic and reasoning was 3.6 years below age level, and her selective visual attention score was that of a 7.9 year old.

I knew we had lots to do! In my next blog, I will outline the program that I set up for Annie.