Evidence Based Outcomes and Progress Reviews

Parents are kept fully informed of their student’s progress.  This includes written anecdotal reports three times a year; a progress review using standardized tests at 12-24 month intervals on request and access to their student’s team captains at any time.

A rigorous approach is used to ascertain student progress in terms of the original assessment and program design.  A use of standardized tests is reapplied at 18-month to 2-year intervals on request, to determine progress outcomes with respect to the  interventions contained in the program design.  BOOST students who are having an intensive intervention have a progress review built in to their programs automatically at 12 month intervals.  For example, if vocabulary development and verbal abstract thinking skills were included in the program design, tests relevant to these skills will be used again to measure levels of performance now available.

The Evidence

A “within subject” research model is used.  The initial assessment and chronological age at the time act as a baseline.  This determines how many years and months of skill levels were achieved when the student first entered the system.  In addition, the student’s rank or rating compared to his/her age cohort and grade classmates is included as a percentile.  This produces a rate of progress for that student before the intervention.

The intervention then takes place over 12-24 months at 2 to 6 hours a week for part time students and 10 hours of one-to-one instruction for BOOST students.

The Progress Review provides the rate of progress in age scores, grade level and percentile ranking as a “post” score.  This allows us to measure the rate of progress, taking the expected rate of growth for that student into consideration across all the measures identified in the pre-test.  This includes both areas of concern, identified in the initial assessment for therapeutic recovery procedures, and areas of strength identified for enhancement.

Over more than 25 years of practice the intensive and targeted training experience used at the Vancouver Learning Centre has demonstrated a very substantial rate of progress improvement on all measures.  Evidence in the form of standardized retesting, but especially improved school performance and especially improved emotional well-being and improved self esteem, have been very strong.  The students and parents have told us in testimonials that the effect is transformational on the lives and performances of our students.