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

This was the title of Chapter 1. Multiple books on the market explain how to write a psychoeducational or psychological report. Our book is distinctly different. We do give guidelines and recommendations on how to structure and write your report, but all of these have a fundamental goal. We strive to write useful and accessible psychoeducational reports that through their structure and underlying philosophy are legally defensible. This book presents not just how to do this but why you should aim for a useful report and how a useful report is more ethical and easy to legally defend.

IDEA (2004) provides clear guidelines regarding parents’ right to be involved in the evaluation process and to participate in the decisions that follow. Parents need to be provided information they can understand if they are to be authentically informed participants in their child’s educational planning and decision making. The ethical and legal obligation to ensure that parents have access to the information they need to authentically and fully participate in the evaluation and decision-making process falls on us as professionals. To be useful for consumers and to make this participation less complicated for consumers, our reports need to clearly answer the referral questions, focus on strengths as well as needs, provide concrete and feasible recommendations for educational planning, and be written so that they are clear and understandable.

Why Should I Change My Report Writing Model?

Bluntly put, the answer to this question is “to be more useful.” Most school psychologists engage in assessment-related activities more than all other activities combined, though many of us have lost our way in a swamp of poorly constructed templates and professional jargon (yes, we know this is dramatic) and are engaging in report writing that does not have a clear purpose in mind. Well-conceptualized assessment practices and effective psychoeducational reports can shape the value and relevance of our services. The psychological report is a direct reflection of the quality and range of services school psychologists provide. They also provide us with reassurance that our practice is legally sound, when questions or concerns do arise.

Assessments and reports framed by collaborative consultation, assessment-based answers to referral questions, and quality recommendations exemplify our ability to engage in a broader range of school psychological services. Through the use of an assessment and report writing model such as question-driven referral-based, our expertise in assessment can be the leverage for more active and useful involvement in collaboration, consultation, prevention, and intervention.

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

As we have previously stated, report writing is an integral but often-overlooked part of the assessment process. We assume that your goal in adopting this format is to write more useful reports. Regardless of the format used, you cannot write a useful report from a poorly conducted assessment. So, our first step is for you to critically look at your assessment practices to make sure you are gathering useful data and information. Refer back to Figure 4.1 (Chapter 4), which illustrates our view of the evaluation cycle. If we were to think about adopting these practices developmentally, we would suggest the following sequence:

1. Start with developing evaluation questions. If you are using a traditional format with a summary or conclusion section, at least address them there.
2. Strengthen your Reason for Referral section. Try to add detail that is unique to the child and expresses the concerns raised by the referring parties.
3. Try using your evaluation questions as headings and integrate data to answer those questions.
4. At logical places in your narrative, try using theme statements as subheadings.

In the following section, we will address how to integrate this model into a preexisting template.

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

This is one of the most common questions we receive from our students in their fieldwork and from professionals who attend our trainings. It is not uncommon for school districts to create a structured template for their school psychologists to use when writing reports. This is sometimes done for consistency so that reports look similar across all of the service providers in the district. We don’t disagree with this strategy; we simply believe that many of these templates do not lend themselves to consumer usefulness. Strict templates can also begin to guide your assessment practices, where the idea of an individualized assessment is lost among the template structure. The report headings start to impact what we assess, how we assess, and how we describe results, leading our reports to look strikingly similar for every student. Unfortunately, school districts also create templates as a legally defensive measure. These are the templates we discussed in Chapter 2, where there is heavy use of boilerplate legal language. Inclusion of statements that inform the reader of the legal mandates for the assessment or quotations taken directly from legal documents bestows a false sense of protection. Remember, writing it does not make it true. The accuracy of these statements needs to be evident to the reader. It is the responsibility of the report writer to show the reader that these mandates have been met rather than simply telling them.

In many of the conversations we have had with practitioners, we realized that rarely do school psychologists question the use of a set template in their district. They accept the template as status quo. However, when their administrators or lead psychologists are approached with a new writing format, examples of what this might look like, and most importantly, the evidence that this style is more useful and legally defensible, they are often more open to change than expected. So our first advice is for practitioners in districts with a set report writing template to approach their administrator with the goal of improving the usefulness of their reports for consumers and more efficiently meeting legal mandates. Provide one of our examples and then also one that you have prepared.

There are definitely school districts that are not going to be easily swayed by the rational presentation of the benefits of this assessment and writing style. In our experience, these tend to be school districts engaged in a great deal of Special Education litigation that have paid legal teams, not educators or psychologists, to create a “legally defensible” writing template. These reports often become compliance documents that are very difficult to read, rather than useful communication tools. Remember, the goal of our assessment is to assist with educational planning and positively influence consumers’ (i.e., teachers’ and parents’) interactions with the student. The report documents students’ present levels of performance and educational needs and is the foundation of the IEP. To be useful for consumers, our reports need to clearly answer the referral questions, focus on strengths as well as needs, provide concrete and feasible recommendations for educational planning, and be written so that they are clear and understandable.

Most district-created templates are a mix of domain- and test-based structures. Let us quickly review why we do not recommend the use of test-based or domain-based report structures and then we will address each of these concerns. First, both of these styles can lead to a strict use of test or domain headings that can predetermine assessment areas and/or tools. Second, this style of presentation lends itself to very limited integration of assessment data. The reader usually has to wade through multiple pages of test descriptions and results before a summary, while trying understand and integrate multiple sources of data.

If you must use a district-created template, our first piece of advice is to separate the template from your assessment practices. Your district’s template basically becomes an organizational structure. Do not let the template frame your evaluation or limit your assessment choices and outcomes. Remember that the written report is a vital part of the assessment process, not a post-assessment obligation. Once the reason(s) for referral have been identified, the referral questions guide your evaluation, including the assessment tools you choose, how you interpret the assessment data, and how you develop your results into meaningful recommendations.

Our second piece of advice is to focus on making your reports more readable. Use the strategies we provide in Chapter 3 to make the writing in your report clearer and more understandable to your readers.

1. Reduce professional jargon by eliminating technical terminology or defining these terms using simpler vocabulary and specific behavioral examples.
2. Consider the length of your reports, including the amount and quality of information you include.
3. Focus the report on information about a particular child and reduce the amount of generic information.
4. Do not take it for granted that your terminology or tables are self-explanatory.
5. Take the time to provide clearly worded definitions and student-specific examples of what abstract constructs may look like at home or at school.
6. If you must include detailed information about specific tests or tables, we recommend that you move them to appendixes.

Finally, refer back to the developmental sequence provided in the previous question. Start with developing evaluation questions. If you are using a traditional format with a summary or conclusion section, at least address them there. Strengthen your Reason for Referral section. Try to add detail that is unique to this child and expresses the concerns raised by the referring parties.

Within your report narrative ensure that you integrate data from multiple data sources, highlight relevant findings, and develop quality recommendations. This may seem to be a challenge in test or domain-based templates, but it is possible. We encourage the use of questions or explanatory statements connected to the headings of forced templates. For example, under the heading Cognitive Abilities, a short question or statement is provided that explains the purpose of this section, such as, Cynthia’s cognitive abilities were assessed using data from a review of her school records, parent and teacher interviews and the Differential Ability Scales–2. In this section we answer the questions: What are Cynthia’s cognitive processing strengths and weaknesses? How do these strengths and weaknesses impact her learning?

This statement provides a context for the information that will follow and encourages the writer to integrate data from multiple sources into relevant and informative findings. At the end of the section, provide an integrated summary answering the two questions (In this section we answer the questions: What are Cynthia’s cognitive processing strengths and weaknesses? How do these strengths and weaknesses impact her learning? Based on the data collected . . .).

Use these strategies to include an introductory purpose and summary of data after each domain or test heading so that information from all sources (i.e., reviews of records, interviews, observations, and testing) can be integrated. When these summaries are provided after each section of the template, they will help guide the reader through the assessment and written report. Example 5 in Appendix II uses a domain-based structure, though it follows a referral-based model of evaluation.

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

After the template question, this is the second-most-common question we receive. We don’t agree that this style of report writing is more time consuming, though it will be when you first begin. Any time we learn something new and incorporate it into our everyday practice, it takes extra time. For example, as students and new psychologists you probably spend hours more on reports than you do as experienced school psychologists. The transition here will be no different. Your first few reports will be more time consuming, but once you start to get the hang of it, we think the overall process is more efficient and it becomes less time consuming in the writing and in the presentation of results to the IEP team.

You are a trained school psychologist, not a diagnostician or assessment technician. As a school psychologist, it is your responsibility to interpret the data, not simply report it, and then integrate the data into meaningful results. If this sounds challenging, then the transition process may be longer because you are going to need to reframe your role in the assessment process from passive (filling in blanks in a template with your assessment data) to active (having your report structure serve you as a useful way to present your evaluation results). If you are already interpreting and integrating data from multiple sources, then the transition to a referral-based report will be much easier.

Out time is precious. As practicing psychologists, we are both very aware of the time limitations placed on school psychologists. We both practice in a state where budget woes have significantly increased caseloads while simultaneously decreasing time at our school sites. We need to use our time more effectively and efficiently. Look back at Figure 4.1, “Evaluation Cycle,” in Chapter 4. Where do you believe you spend the most time in the evaluation process? We think most school psychologists spend the majority of their time conducting testing during the Conduct Assessments stage. Although this is clearly a vital part of the evaluation cycle, to engage in a question-driven, referral-based assessment and report you will need to reorganize your assessment time allocation. More time is spent during the early stages of the cycle, including clarifying concerns and the reason for referral, designing questions and hypotheses, and choosing assessment procedures and tools. We hope it is implicit what this means you won’t be doing. We don’t mean to be patronizing, but to be clear: This means you will not send an Assessment Plan home before speaking with the parent and teacher and reviewing the students’ records. You will not automatically assess in every area possible and you will not use the same battery of tests for each student.

It is important to develop an accurate list of concerns early in the evaluation process. This provides a focus for your evaluation questions and informs your choice of assessment procedures. Although it is always possible to discover something about a child you did not suspect going into an evaluation, it is our experience that most often it is feasible and practical to narrow the suspected disabilities to a small number of possibilities. Sharpening the focus of your evaluation clarifies the entire evaluation process and prevents us from over-assessing children, making the assessment process less intrusive for children and teachers. It simultaneously saves us time and makes for a more coherent and efficiently conducted assessment. Surely this is a win-win for everyone involved.

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

The answer to this question is, “yes and no.” The basic structure will not change, but the questions we ask and the nature of the information we gather will likely vary. For example, if we were assessing a child who is bilingual, we would ask questions about language use and preference. We would also be interested in the child’s level of language development in both English and his or her home language. This information would likely go into the Background section, although we might also pose specific evaluation questions such as “How well can Lina speak English and Spanish?” or “What language does Lina speak best?” or “What language or languages will provide the most accurate information regarding Lina’s abilities?” In addition, there are few appropriate standardized tests for use with bilingual youth, so most evaluations will focus on the RIO (records, interviews, and observations) aspect of the RIOT framework and less on the T (test). This will mean the report will contain more descriptive narrative than you would find in an evaluation with a monolingual, English-speaking child.

The answer is similar for evaluations done with children with different suspected disabilities. Our experience is that evaluations focused on certain disabilities (e.g., emotional disturbance, or Other Health Impaired) also will have more RIO and less T. Several of our examples in Appendix II focus on these issues and hopefully you will find them helpful.

Do Triennial Reevaluations Differ from Other Reports?

The answer is again, “yes and no.” As with characteristics of the child, the basic structure and ideas behind the assessment do not change. Nevertheless, because our evaluations and reports are individualized, they will of course differ. Triennials, or three-year reevaluations, have a legal purpose. They are designed to evaluate whether the student’s eligibility, placement, and services are meeting their educational needs. Given that, we have found certain things helpful with reevaluations.

As with all our reports, we write an expanded Reason for Referral section. In this section we note how long the child has been in special education, what his current disability classification is, what services he receives, and what, if any, new concerns are present. See the example of Christy in what follows.

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

As with an academic article or technical writing of any sort, charts, tables, or figures should be used to help the reader better understand complex information. Keeping this in mind, when you consider whether to insert a chart or table into a report, it is important to ask yourself if that chart or table will be truly helpful to the reader. In many of the reports we read, each test or behavior rating scale is followed by a table listing all of the scores for each index, subtest, or scale. Even as experienced professionals, we find all these data overwhelming. It can also lead to inappropriate interpretations by less knowledgeable readers. (Yes, Jeanne Anne once had to spend a significant amount of time explaining to a lawyer why a single subtest scale score of 6 did not equate to a learning disability!) It is easy to imagine that parents or teachers will rarely find this “throwing data on the page” strategy to be useful. After all, it is our responsibility as professionals to give meaning to these data, and not simply report them, leaving the interpretation to the reader. If you believe this type of data is potentially helpful to a reader, then we recommend you place the charts or tables as appendixes so they will not interrupt the flow of the narrative of the report.

One way to think about this is to ask the question, “Will this chart or table do a better job of explaining the meaning of these data than I can do in a narrative?” Some examples include using a table to organize a complex school history where a child has changed schools often. In this case, it is often confusing to read a listing of several schools in a paragraph and it is clearer to read them in a chronological list or a table format. We have also used tables to represent progress-monitoring data, such as the type of information that might be gathered during an academic response-to-intervention process or a behavior plan. In this case, a graph with an upward- or downward-sloping trend-line will often be a much more powerful communication of progress than a narrative explaining that progress. Of course, in each of these cases, these visual aids should be accompanied by a short narrative explaining them and highlighting the findings. It is the combination of words and a visual representation that makes these strong representations of the point being made.

Do I Need to Use a Specific Format When Writing?

This is really up to the writer, though we cannot emphasize enough that you need to be consistent in how you choose to format your report. For example, we often see reports where each table, chart, and heading is formatted differently. This simply becomes a confusing visual mess for the reader. We recommend that you consider using the general guidelines for layout and formatting described by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition (American Psychological Association, 2006). These include margins, page numbering, font, headings, subheadings, and even tables and charts. Many reports have a running head of some sort and we recommend that if you use one, you also format that according to APA style.

There are two main reasons for recommending that you use APA formatting and layout conventions. The first is that most practitioners are familiar with APA style from graduate school. Thus, you do not have to learn something new or, worse yet, make something up. The second reason is that it will ultimately make your life as a report writer easier. Once you have settled on a format, you can build this into a template and, for the most part, forget about it. The purpose of formatting and layout conventions is to make reading a paper or report easier for the reader. It also communicates that you are familiar with the conventions of your profession or, put another way, you have the knowledge and background to write like a psychologist.

Formatting, especially the use of subheadings and tables, is meant to make the report easier to read. Many of the psychoeducational reports we have read have very complicated formatting, especially in their use of subheadings and tables. From our point of view, this makes them more difficult rather than easier to read for almost all of the potential consumers of the report. It is obvious from reading these reports that the authors made formatting choices that made things easier for themselves as writers rather than for the reader. Good reports, like good writing of any sort, are reader centered rather than author centered. As we have stated before, when considering whether to use tables or charts or how many subheadings to use, consider whether they are truly helpful for the consumer.

Last Words

In the appendixes that follow this final chapter, we have included seven different report samples as well as a checklist to use to evaluate your current reports. You will note that the sample reports are different, both stylistically and in terms of the characteristics of the children involved. We do this purposefully so you can choose how to implement the suggestions we offer in your own way.

We do not underestimate the challenge of shifting your perspective on reports and implementing a set of new strategies. At the same time, we urge you to make the effort. We do not believe you need to implement everything we have reviewed, especially all at once. Yet, we also believe that implementing some of the suggestions we have made will improve your practice. One of the points we have tried to make is that you cannot separate the evaluation process from how you write your reports. Given this, we think that changing how you write your reports will change how you view your evaluations and even how you view the children you work with. This is a good thing. Our reports are a direct reflection of the quality and range of services we can provide as school psychologists. We contend that our reports should reflect the dynamic nature of the problem-solving process and serve as a foundation for engaging in more consultation, prevention, and intervention. A referral-based, question-driven model of assessment and report writing can be an important tool in your journey to expand your scope of practice and make your services more useful to parents, teachers, and other educators.

We assume that if you are reading this last paragraph, you have made the considerable effort to read this book and are ready to begin this process. As one of our good friends and colleagues often says: Onward!