Measuring Progress with So-Called Objective Tests

Speaking of “objective” measures like the TOVA or IVA: I tried both, meaning that I bought them and charged my clients for my use of them for several months one time and a bit less than a month the second time.

I’ve thrown the TOVA away twice. The first time occurred when, after spending 22 minutes in a darkened room with a kid who did everything but climb up on the table and was holding the micro switch by the cable and swinging it against his leg to “press” the button–during which time I eased my frustration with the belief that at least this kid would have the highest scores ever recorded–the result I got to take to his parents was that he was “within normal limits”! I promised never again to charge them for another TOVA and we went on with training which, after about 40 sessions, demonstrated some changes with which they were happy (and no, I didn’t do another TOVA to see if he was still “normal”).

Later that year I ran into a physician who was hyping for the TOVA at the Winter Brain conference, and I told him my experience. He told me with a sheepish grin, “Yeah, that can happen. You have to adjust for intelligence sometimes.” I told him I must have missed that part of the instructions, and he told me, “Oh, it’s not a formal adjustment.”

The second time I threw it away (after buying IVA and TOVA to compare them a few years later) was after presenting parents with an impressive report on the improvements from pre/post TOVA on their kid. They went off on me. The father told me they were still getting called 4-5 times a week by the kid’s teacher to complain about his classroom behavior, it still took hours every night to get his homework done, they still couldn’t let him out of their sight because he was so impulsive that he did dangerous things without a thought, and they still couldn’t take him to church and he still wasn’t getting invited to birthday parties. “I don’t care what the damned test shows!” And I agreed 100%. Didn’t see much, if any, change in him. They hadn’t paid me to improve his TOVA scores, and what they had paid me to do hadn’t happened.

So, it’s not so hard to objectively track results without formal testing. How many panic attacks did you have this week? How many nights where it took you more than 20 minutes to sleep? How many calls/notes from the teacher? How long did his homework take? How many seat assignments were brought home because they were not completed?