OTS 171: Screenings With a VMI Tool That Scores Itself
- Jayson Davies
- Mar 10
- 44 min read
Updated: May 5
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 171 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
In this episode Jayson teams up with guests Karen and Heather to get into the transformative world of Psymark—a digital tool designed to revolutionize school-based occupational therapy assessments. Karen’s journey from school psychologist to a tech innovator, alongside Heather’s experience as an occupational therapist, offers listeners a deep dive into how technology is reshaping the way we monitor and support students' visual motor integration.
Discover the magic behind self-scoring iPad assessments that promise to simplify processes, provide teachers and therapists with precise insights, and potentially reduce referrals, all while laying the groundwork for essential interventions. Join us for an exploration of cutting-edge strategies making waves in the field of occupational therapy.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will recall the components and purpose of the Psymark tool
Learners will identify the specific visual motor assessment areas that the Psymark tool evaluates
Learners will be able to indicate some of the initial research and data analysis of the psymark tool
Guests Bio
Dr. Karen Silberman leads the team at Psymark after an extensive career in education serving as a teacher, school psychologist and special education director. Karen has presented at numerous conferences including AOTA, NASP, and CASP. As the mother of a child who struggled with visual-motor issues, she has an enhanced understanding of how visual-motor problems can impact families of children with learning differences.
Heather Donovan earned her Master’s in Occupational Therapy from USC in 2012 and spent the first seven years of her career at a private pediatric clinic, gaining valuable experience in early intervention, insurance-based, and school-based practice. In late 2019, she transitioned to her current role as a school district occupational therapist at Mountain View School District in El Monte, CA. Through this position, she collaborated closely with Dr. Karen Silberman, and after Dr. Silberman’s retirement, Heather began beta testing and consulting with Dr. Silberman and the Psymark team.
Quotes
“Our first study was looking at differences between paper, pencil, finger, and stylus. And so, with that, we were kind of surprised at the results, but the results showed that there was no significant difference between paper, pencil, finger, and stylus.”
-Karen Silberman, Ed.D., LEP
“There is an overall accuracy score, and that is made up of scale, rotation, line consistency, and noise. So scale and rotation, everyone understands. Line consistency is how close the line that the person drew is aligned with the given line. Noise are those extraneous lines that are outside. “
-Karen Silberman, Ed.D., LEP
“If they're newer, then maybe I'll do all three. But if it's a student that I know that I'm really focusing more on the letter formation, then I'm gonna use the letters. In motor cases, I tend to use the letters more than the shapes and numbers, mostly because I see the shapes tools are great just looking at underlying visual motor skills.”
-Heather Donovan, MA, OTR/L
“We saw a 48% increase in kids in the proficient range for their visual motor skills.”
-Karen Silberman, Ed.D., LEP/L
Resources
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hey, OTP, Have you ever wished that your assessment tool, like the BOD or the VMI or any other tool that you use would just score itself? Well, that's exactly what we are discussing in this episode today. I'm excited to introduce you to a new tool that just might redefine how we assess visual motor skills. Seriously, this is one that I hope you actually look back on and get to say I am so glad that Jayson shared this with me, because honestly, I really do think that this is going to change the way that you do things. I also think that this is a tool that's going to change the way that all assessments do things. I was first introduced to the simmark app way back in 2019 at the OT Association of California conference, but now it is officially ready to help save ot practitioners and school psychologists and probably a few others, including teachers, time, energy and headaches. Even better, it can help us work with teachers to assist students before an IEP is even needed. Think. MTSS, right. Well, to help share all of this, I am joined by Karen Silverman, a former elementary teacher turned school psychologist, and Heather Donovan, an occupational therapist who's been in the trenches of school based practice and also who actually went to school with me back at USC together, Karen and Heather will help to share exactly how and why this iPad based tool is changing the VMI game. Specifically, we will discuss what the simmark tool evaluates, how you can use it as part of your evaluation, and how you can use it in an MTSS program to screen entire classrooms and provide supports to the teachers. So stay tuned as Karen and Heather share their research backing the SCI Mark innovation and how you can implement these tools to support your students and teachers. Let's dive in.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now, to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Karen and Heather, welcome to the OT school house podcast. I hope you're both doing fantastic, Karen. Let's start with you. How are you today?
Karen Silberman
Hey, I'm great. Thank you, Jayson, so much for inviting us to the OT school house. It's really an honor for us to be here with you today, and we really appreciate it
Jayson Davies
absolutely. It's great to have you as well. Always great to have someone who's not an occupational therapist on this show. It's always fun. I'm sure we will learn so much from you today, but we also have an occupational therapist joining us today. Heather, Heather, how you doing today?
Heather Donovan
I'm doing great, and I'm so excited to be here as well.
Jayson Davies
Awesome.Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited this is going to be about 45 minutes or so that we're just going to have a good time talking about visual motor integration, talking about copying and drawing and all the fun stuff that we know goes hand in hand with school based occupational therapy. So to get us started, I want to give you both a moment to introduce yourselves just a bit. And going back to Karen for a second, I already kind of gave away the spoiler that you're a psychologist, but why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself,
Karen Silberman
right? So thanks, Jayson, I started my professional journey as an elementary school teacher. So I taught all grades from first through sixth, and then I transitioned to become a school psychologist. And over that period of time, I also had kids of my own, and I had one of my sons who had visual motor problems, and that I saw a lot of impacts with his learning. And it was a, really a shock to me as a teacher, that I had trouble teaching my own son how to how to write, and that's really when I first became familiar with OTs and I can honestly say that an OT was one of the first people who really understood how to work with him and how to to help him with his needs, because he didn't fit into traditional categories. So anyway, after becoming a school psychologist, I kept going to school and moving forward in my career. So I got a doctorate and then moved ahead and became a program specialist and a director. Then I got to retire, because at the same time, we've been working on creating the tests, and I got to retire and devote myself full time to sim. So we're our goal is really in bringing accurate, self scoring, visual motor tests to practitioners in the field.
Jayson Davies
I love that. And yeah, I know I was introduced to Cy Marc several years ago when I first ran into and it was just kind of getting started before it was commercially available. And I just knew that the idea was fan. Fantastic, and that was before AI was even like kind of a thing. And now that that aspect of self scoring that you say that's huge right now. So we'll get more into that in a moment. But, yeah, I'm excited to talk about that. So Heather, welcome. It's great to have you and share a little bit about a your experience as an OT and also kind of how you fit into the Cy Marx story. Well,
Heather Donovan
I was actually in, you know, Jayson class at USC, and we graduated together back in, I think what 2012 seems like forever.
Jayson Davies
Think so too long ago now.
Heather Donovan
And, you know, I immediately started working at a private pediatric clinic, and I stayed there, I think, for about eight years, and it really was a great place to start my career. Lots of training and mentorship. I gained valuable experience in multiple settings that really shaped the therapist I am today. And then a position opened a school district job that I started at the end of 2019 and that's where I met and started to work closely with Dr Silverman. And then after she retired from the district job, she approached me about being a beta tester for simmark. And since then, I've basically been involved, like on a volunteer basis for the past two years, and my role has largely just been in formal consultation when I have time, of course. But similar to you, I recognize that the cymarg tools had so much potential, and I was really happy to be a part of it, even in a small way. And then more recently, I was also to I was fortunate enough to be involved in the pilot screener program for TK students in my school district.
Jayson Davies
Fantastic, awesome. Well, thank you both for introducing yourself for a minute. I want to jump back to Karen and we're going to dive deep into cymarg, but I do want to give you just like, what is that elevator pitch? Right? Like, the first time you meet an OT the first time you meet a school psychologist. You kind of gave us a one liner a moment ago. But if you had a whole, you know, 45 seconds, how do you pitch sidemark? What is it? What's the purpose? And, yeah, just go for it.
Karen Silberman
Okay, so what we have created the first ever Digital Visual motor tests on iPads that are self scoring convenient and give results in nine different areas within minutes, and the larger sort of pitch to this is right? We have three tools right now. They are shapes, letters and numbers, and these tools are for the purpose of them is to to do progress monitoring. So these are really progress monitoring tests. The exciting piece is that this year, we are coming out with two new tools. One is a screener, which occupational therapists are that we've talked to are very interested in because what the tool does is help to give scores within broad groups. So finding out where the child is, are they proficient? What range are they falling in, or are they in the intervention range? And with that, then they will also get interventions that that are can be used, and it's really a tool thinking of kind of MTSS or RTI to help prevent those referrals to OTs who are already overwhelmed, right? So, so that's our goal with the screener. Then later in the year, we will be coming out with standardized, standardized shapes test that can be used. So again, it's self scoring, and we're looking at standardization for ages four through seven. So we're super excited about this. And 2025, is we're looking forward. It's going to be a great year for Cy Marc, awesome.
Jayson Davies
I am definitely going to like tune my inner Mark Cuban right now and feel like I'm on Shark Tank and ask you some follow ups here, because you mentioned self scoring. How is it self scoring? Right? Like, we're very used to using the VMI, the berry, VMI, the bot, but those obviously are not self scoring. So how is this tool self scoring, right?
Karen Silberman
Well, so this kind of gets into how we developed in the first place. Because just to kind of back it up a little bit, this actually started when I finished my doctorate, and one of my professors approached me and one of my fellow students and said, we want to do research. But then so we said, Great, yeah, let's do research together. And when we started looking into it, we said, you know, why are we still using rulers and protractors to score when there's this incredible. Technology that does everything else. This was years ago. Jayson, this was years ago, and so so with that. Then we both have kids that are techies who are now adults and working in technology. And we went to them and said, Is this even possible? Is this a possibility? And they were like, Yeah, easy peasy. Nothing has been easy peasy, right? Nothing has been. But so your question of, oh, how is it self scoring? It's highly complex, actually. And we got a patent in 2021, for this. So I wish I could tell you, in a quick, easy sense, oh, this is all it is. No, it's actually super complex to talk through the scoring. What I can tell you, though is that it's taken a lot of iterations and years of work to put this together, to make sure that the scoring is accurate, and the scoring in all of these nine different areas. So it's complex and it's but what we want for you to see on your end is to make it look like it's easy. Because when you see it, it looks like, Oh, that's easy, right? Oh, I'll just copy these shapes, and then, oh, there are the scores. There's a lot happening on the back end that are is measuring each, each piece of what, what the examinee is doing, so that it's measuring the speed, it's measuring how far away your line is from the line that's given it's measuring the rotation and the scale, like all of these pieces are being done simultaneously.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, it is quite a feat. I've played around with it a little bit, and I think we'll go to Heather with this next question to kind of give us an idea of what it actually looks like to use. I don't even know if we've mentioned yet that this is an iPad app, or a series of iPad apps. So everything is done 100% on the iPad. And so Heather, if you want to kind of, really briefly, kind of, I guess, almost in a way, share the experience of an occupational therapy practitioner using this tool. Like, what does it actually look like for the OT to use it?
Heather Donovan
Well, basically it's like an app, you click on, you open, you enter in the student's demographic information, and then, and the first page has a lot of other information, like on how to use it, and updates and all that kind of stuff. But basically, when you start the assessment, it's very plain and very easy. It's like the top part of the iPad has a shape, and then you just prompt the student to copy it below, and then you hit Next, and you do that until the assessment you get through all of the test items. And it's incredibly short and brief and easy to use. That's basically how I would summarize it? Yeah,
Jayson Davies
I mean, the copying a shape that is on the top of the page to the bottom of the page sounds very familiar to us who have used many tools, but obviously it's very different in the sense that we're not using pencil and paper. One thing that you said you copy it right, but I didn't hear you say was, is this using a stylus? Is this using a finger? Does it matter? Does it have to be an Apple pencil because it's on an iPad? What about that?
Heather Donovan
Well, it's funny, you should ask, because that's been a big discussion point in some of our meetings and talks, because, interestingly enough, they did kind of a study looking at using a stylus and using their finger, and what they showed the results were the same. So which I thought, well, then you're really you're eliminating the tool use part of measuring the visual motor skill. So in a sense, like when you're using your finger, you're really looking at the ability to copy the shapes, versus managing the tool and the grasp and all those other things that also goes into writing. So then it's kind of like, I just thought that in itself, I told I told Karen. I was like, That is actually a really interesting finding in itself, that the there was no difference of using the stylus versus the finger. So when it comes to use for me, I'll be honest, like, I really it's a case by case basis. Like, sometimes I'll have them use their finger, and sometimes I'll have them use the stylus, depending on what I'm trying to look at when I'm using it as a progress monitoring tool.
Jayson Davies
Interesting, interesting. Like, I'm currently, I know if you're listening on the podcast, you can't see this, but I currently have a right, right stylist in my hands, which hands, which I don't know, it's just sitting on my desk. And I was like, Oh, hey, I'm gonna play fidget with this. But anyways, Karen, do you want to add anything to that, whether it be your original intentions or kind of what you're seeing now, actually.
Karen Silberman
You know that was our first study, because we thought we Why move forward? With this, if we're seeing these drastic differences. So our first study was looking at differences between paper pencil, finger and stylus and so so with that, we were kind of surprised at the results, but the results showed that there was no significant difference between paper pencil, finger and stylus, and so that's why we're saying, Yeah, you can use either your finger or or the stylus. What? When I get into this a little more later, but Heather and I were, we actually worked with some TK teachers in the Mountain View School District. Mountain View wanted to use our tests as a screener. And said, you know, we love these tests. Can we just give them to all of our TK students? And we said, Yeah, great, absolutely. And so, so Heather and I collaborated on that, and so we had the teachers do the testing and then talk to them about, you know, what, what did you find with this? And the teachers decided, together as a group, we want all the kids to use just their finger. Wow. Okay. And so we said, okay, that's fine. And so then with the results, when we asked them how, how did the results match what you're seeing in the classroom? They said, Oh yeah, this is, this is exactly what we're seeing in the class, where those kids who felt in the intervention range, yeah, those kids definitely need support. Those kids who are proficient are good. We have some kids though that their handwriting is not very good, but we're How come they did well on these tests, right? And so then we could talk to them about grip like, this isn't really a visual motor problem so much as how are they holding, right? So it really prompted this whole other conversation, yeah, with them. So that's kind of a longer answer, but that's what we're finding, is that it's really because our tools are looking at that visual motor piece, and so is it really a visual motor problem, or are there problems with grip?
Jayson Davies
Right? That's exactly where my head was going as you were talking right. Like you think about the other tools. You have to use a pencil, unless you're going to put, like, finger paint on someone's finger or something. I'm like, let them paint right like, you have to use a pencil, and therefore you are no longer segmenting or focusing in on the visual motor aspect. There's so many other aspects going on, and so that could be a limitation. We all you know, think about tests for other purposes, but you think about the motor free visual perception test, but here it's still motor right? You've got to use your finger and you've got to do that, but you're reducing one factor in getting a true visual motor score, as opposed to a fine motor, visual motor score, or whatever you want to call it. So interesting. Very, very interesting. Heather, have you ever tried this like, Have you ever used had a student use it with their finger and then a few minutes later try it with the stylist to determine if there's a difference?
Heather Donovan
Not like, a few minutes later, usually my sessions are I'm limited on time, so it's kind of like, you know, let's move on to something else. The other thing that I've talked to Karen about, too, is the importance of generalizing the skill. So it's kind of like, I want to see like they're showing me this on the iPad, but then can they generalize that to the paper? So I'm always making sure I'm using kind of a combination of both to look at that. But to the point of your question, it would be fascinating to kind of play around and see that more, but I haven't done it myself.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, obviously the research that you both shared a little bit about earlier shares that in general, the vision visual motor skills are are similar, but for an individual child, right? If we do that visual motor test, and they do come out average, and then we kind of have that inkling, hey, maybe it is the pencil grip, or maybe it is their fine motor skills that are impacting them. We could almost do the same test now with a stylist, and that would be very interesting results to take to an IEP meeting and say, hey, look, we did this with just their finger. They did great. As soon as we involved a pencil. Not so much. And so now we kind of know which way to lean when it comes to IEP goals and interventions and all that fun stuff. So fantastic. Karen, is there anything else you want to share before we kind of move on about the development and kind of where, where it started? I'm sorry, the started from the bottom. Now we hear kind of lyrics came into my head just now. But anything else you just kind of want to share about the development or kind of the background behind this?
Karen Silberman
Yes. Well, what I can say, let me, let me think about it, but, but with this, what I can say is that research has really always been at our core, that that's how we started, and so that's that's always been where we are with the development of it too. We started. We started as school psychs thinking, Okay, we're gonna create a test that's, you know, on the iPads, self scoring, thinking about school psychologists honestly, like, okay, great. And then we took it to conferences as research and school psychs and other parts of the country said, we don't do this kind of testing. You know, our OT does the all the visual motor testing. So that's when we started talking to OTs and going to OT conferences. And the OT said, Yeah, we love this. This is great. And what we really do is work with kids, with letters and numbers like, that's what we do, generally. So can you create tests for letters and numbers? And so we said, Yes, we can, right? So then, so we created those tests, and with those, then we also involved another occupational therapist, Heather has been really fabulous to work with, and has done a lot of consultation with us. Kimberly Coates is another one who has worked closely with us, and she actually designed the font for our letters and numbers so and we got recommendations from them on what letters we should use. So it's a it's a mix of letters that involves all of the important lines that you're looking at, vertical, horizontal, you know, diagonal circles. So we work closely with them. So that's how we then created letters and numbers. We brought that out, but then the next thing we heard was like, you heard from Mountain View. Then we started hearing from a number of districts and different agencies. Like this is great. We just want to use it on all of our kids. So can we do that? So we said yes, but what we found out was the teachers really couldn't understand the results, because OTs and psychs are used to looking at a list of numbers and being able to interpret that, but teachers look at it and say, That's interesting. Now what right? So with that, then that's where we went to the screener. So that led us into the screener so that teachers would have this ability to use it on their whole class, and they could develop it or create, you know, use it with their whole class. So that's an in Mountain View. That's where we started working with them that way. There are now a couple of other districts that we've done the same thing with, and so with that, then, right now, it's been all by hand. We're going through the numbers and then creating groups for the for the teachers, and then giving them interventions, because that's what they were asking for. So I can tell you, from the cymark end, we're always listening to our customers. We really want to know what people think of it, what they're asking for, and then coming out with it. So then later this year, we will have enough data so that we will be able to standardize because people have been asking that really, since the inception, fantastic. Is it standardized? You know, that's always the second question. And so we will be coming out with that later on this year. We're looking at probably late summer, when the standardization part, yeah, so that will be ages four through seven. So it's been a journey, I can say. And it hasn't been a journey. It's something. When you create something and you put it out in the world, you may think you're doing one thing with it, but then how people actually use it and what they want like it, you know, we we really have listened, because it hasn't been the path, honestly, that we necessarily thought at the beginning.
Jayson Davies
Wow, yeah, I'm excited for the standardization. I honestly, you told me about this, what, maybe about four months ago or so, that you're kind of going down this venture. I didn't think it would be relatively soon. I thought I'd take a lot longer. So congratulations on that. Let's talk about that, though, in a I don't know, in my interactions with especially school based occupational therapy practitioners, I know your your people are definitely more than just school based ot practitioners. But to some degree, there is this idea that we don't. Need standardization tools, then, you know, let's not get into that discussion. But that is still great that you're doing it. Because, I mean, even if it is standardized, you can, you know, you'll still get data from it. But you talked about there being nine different aspects that this test looks at. Can you share a little bit more about that, and maybe briefly, at first point out, are you looking to standardize or get standardized scores for all nine or just a few?
Karen Silberman
Yeah, we are looking at all nine different areas. So with that, then the different areas that we have so there is an overall accuracy score, and that is made up of scale rotation, line consistency and noise. So scale and rotation, everyone understands line consistency is how close the line that that the person Drew is aligned with the line that was given noise are those extraneous lines that are outside. So I like to say that, you know, when you ask a child to draw a circle and then they make a happy face, so it's those which everyone any OT, I'm sure, as a psych, I saw that, so you see that. So those are the pieces that make up the accuracy score and and so you can see all four of those. The other parts of it are those we give right now as raw scores, because that we find as being more helpful to people. So it's that contact time, how much time was your finger or stylus in contact with the iPad. It also measures speed, so in centimeters per second, and it's measuring the line speed consistency. So was it back and forth line? Or, you know, were they going back and forth a lot, or was it a really highly consistent line? So these are some of the, you know, the overall scoring that we're we're looking at. So definitely the accuracy score and those pieces that make up the accuracy score will all all be standardized. What I can say is that we will still have available the progress monitoring, which is not standardized. Because, yeah, I've heard from ot some of them, you know, they say, Oh, we can only use standardized measures in our district, whereas others say, I don't care about standardized. So, yeah, exactly so, so they can use either or, and everyone understands the numbers with standardization. When it's not standardized, it takes a little more time to work through that. That's what that's what we're finding.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, wow, I just again. It kind of blows my mind, because we're so used to scoring tools by hand, by eye, maybe with a little clear layover that tells us if something is a centimeter you know, away from the line. And it's just amazing, because not only are you able to get quote, unquote like the accuracy scores, but you're able to get so much more information than just whether or not the shape looks like the shape is supposed to look like you're getting so much more than that. And again, that's something that you know you'd only get with with technology really quickly. Karen, yeah, sorry, when you first thought about this app, what were you hoping that it would be able to do?
Karen Silberman
Well, we had the idea that it would be self scoring and give people really precise information that you can't get, because here's the reality, and I can't speak for OTs, but in general, school psychologists, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but me right when you're out There assessing so many kids and you've got the the VMI, and it's just like, okay, you know the one zero, yeah, it looks right. It looks right. Hey, I'm, I'm guilty of that. And so, so there's the eyeballing approach. And so we thought, is this and and honestly, for school psychs, it's kind of like, okay, I did that. I had to get that done. So is there a way where we can provide people something that's really precise, very accurate, and is helpful? I mean, that's all. That's our bottom line. Is this helpful to the practitioners, which will then be helpful for kids, because visual motor has real life consequences for people, as I saw with my own son, and so any tools we can have to really better understand that to be able to support our students and our clients that way. Okay, that's, that's honestly our aim, so, so that that's where we came from, we didn't come from, and we want to have nine different you know, that was all through, honestly, it was through testing. We've done years of testing and looking at data and like running through it and running through it so so many times, that's where all of that came from.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, wow, wow, yeah. It just baffles me what we can do with technology. But it takes someone willing to go out there and spend 567, years making that happen, because it does take time. We appreciate it. Thanks. Going to Heather. Now, how does the use of digital tools like sidemark or or others, if you want to speak to anything else that you that you've used, how does that enhance your assessment process? Or has it changed the way that you've assessed? Is it still pretty similar? You just swap out one tool for this using sidemark? Or how has it basically improved or changed the way that you do evaluations?
Heather Donovan
Well, you know, I think having any assessment that is more efficient and quick to administer is great, but then the scoring piece kind of, what Karen was hinting at, is really the big one, right? Because I did a time study recently, and I think I spent 60 to 90 minutes a week scoring assessments, you know? And it was just, well, that was, that was during that time, it was very evaluation heavy time of year. But it just made me think, I'm like, Yeah, imagine if these things just score themselves much easier. And I do know that a lot of assessments are moving in that direction, right? Like, I think, like the Q global, like, you just enter it in and it scores, that kind of thing. So as far as this tool, you know, enhancing the assessment process, I would just say, like, having something that is more efficient and more accurate, of course, enhances it right so, and I describe it as, we all have our toolbox of assessments that we use, depending on what the you know presenting concerns are, and that's this is just one to have On your toolbox right as part of that assessment process. And if it's quicker and easier than some of the others, then I'm all for it.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. And really quickly, remind me again, like when it's self scoring itself, does it take, like, you know, 30 minutes to process everything, or is it pretty darn instant?
Heather Donovan
It is pretty darn instant. I mean, I think it depends on your internet connection, because there's got to be that communication back and forth. But yeah, it's, it's pretty, pretty instantaneous. Yeah, wow.
Jayson Davies
So are you able to save those results or email them to yourself so you have them for later? Or how do you kind of, obviously, we don't write up our evaluation like in the moment that we see the kids. So do you just email it to yourself or?
Heather Donovan
Well, it's in the app. So I just Yeah, and I don't know Karen could probably speak to because that's the other thing. She's already mentioned this but she is, she's definitely, she's right that they take the feedback from what people say. And I say that because she's constantly they're making changes, but it's for the better. So she's like, how can we make this easier for people? So So, yeah,
Karen Silberman
yeah. So you can upload all of that, so just to let your listeners know too, the results that you get, it takes, typically three to five minutes. And so you can, as you're waiting there, it's scoring as long as you have Wi Fi. So you have to have Wi Fi to enter the demographic data and save that, and you have to have Wi Fi to score. So if you're in a location, because I know some districts I worked in, maybe there was Wi Fi at the district, but then it was really hard at schools. So as long as you you can administer the test without Wi Fi, and it will save that data. So then when you get to Wi Fi, you can score it, and once, once you score, it, it takes three to five minutes for scoring. So part of what comes up with the scoring is you get a graphic display. So we have two graphs, one one for the individual test results. So that's a bar graph, so you can clearly see differences in the scoring. And then the other one is a line graph, because it's progress monitoring, so you can see over time, how that student has done in all the all the different areas. And they're color coded, so we chose colors that people, even with visual problems, will be able to see. So. So that you can you can see, oh, what the accuracy score is. That's blue up here on my line graph. And you can highlight which areas you want to look at. So that if you're in an IEP, or if you're meeting with a teacher or parent, you can quickly and easily show them on the iPad what the results look like, but you can also download that so that all that information can be downloaded into your report from the iPad.
Jayson Davies
I love that. I just think that it's so nice that you can, like, go to an IEP and just copy and paste that, that bar chart into the IEP, and then a year later, if you are you know someone who does little like one, two page annual reports, like just an update on their goals, you can show you know the progress over time with a little chart from there. So that just makes our lives a little bit easier, and it also helps the parents right? Like we talk about data all the time, but I just find that at the end of the day, ot practitioners, we're getting better, but we're still not the best at showing data. A lot of other people are better at showing data than us, and so anytime that we can easily show data that that is just fantastic. All right, we're going to get into the interventions. But Heather, when you're using this tool to kind of look at the progress that a student is making. Are you typically using all three? Do you feel that you need to use all three, the shapes, letters and numbers? Or are you just kind of picking one or one or two? Or how does that work for you?
Heather Donovan
Yeah, no. So I it depends on the kid and their age, or, kind of like my experience with them, if they're newer, then maybe I'll do all three. But if it's a student that I know that I'm like, really focusing more on the letter formation, then I'm going to use the letters. In most cases, I tend to use the letters more than the shapes and numbers, mostly because I see the shapes tools are great just looking at underlying visual motor skills, right? Whereas for the letters, I'm really tracking the progress of that student's ability to form letters, if that makes sense.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha. And remind me again, how many earlier you talked about, like trying to figure out what letters to use and whatnot. And so how many letters does it go through? Does it go through the entire alphabet? Or Yeah. So
Karen Silberman
we have 16 different letters, and it's a mix of upper and lower case. And so with that, we did go to Heather and Kim and ask for their advice on what they what they advised for us. And so we we picked the letters that that they were advising, so it's a mix of these, but we didn't want to have, we didn't really want to have this wrote a, a, b, b, really. So we we wanted this nice mix, so it could really look at different letters, but give you the information that that you need so that the test itself is giving you this, this look at the child and what their abilities are, without having it a really tedious, long test for the child to sit through. So we have 16 different letters, and then we have the numbers zero through nine.
Jayson Davies
Okay, and kind of a follow up on that. Then we talked about the assessment piece, like the nine different areas that it's looking at. Are we finding in general, or do we not know yet if a score, if a child scores, you know, a certain score on the numbers, they're likely to score similar with the letters. Do we have any data on that yet?
Karen Silberman
Well, you know, so we do have other schools and districts that are using this as screener tools, and so we are getting a lot more data now that that is coming in, which is fantastic for us. I would say overall numbers for kids tends to be kind of an easier test. And kids tend to be, you know, you're seeing slightly higher abilities, and in the on the numbers test letters would run a close second to that shapes like Heather talked about is really tapping in. There's more cognition involved in shapes. And so with that, then you're really tapping more into those underlying visual motor skills. And so when you give all three, then you are I think it's a really nice look at kind of overall how the child is doing. And so that's, that's what we have been using with as screeners, like they, they give all three now when Heather and I work. Together in Mountain View the district, they wanted just letters and numbers to start with. And so the teacher started with letters and numbers to look at that. And then the interesting thing about that experience was in meeting with the teachers, and this is really, I think this is very unusual. Jayson, the teachers were so excited about it that they asked to give the shapes test. So this is not typically what teachers want to do is do more testing. But they they were really excited about what they were seeing with the kids, and so they said, Can we give the shapes test too, so that we can see that part two. So what, what we saw, though, with with that, with that group of teachers, was overall, broad success. So all of the kids did better that after, after eight weeks, we were seeing this, this wonderful success with the kids. The teachers wanted to continue it another four weeks to finish out the year. So we did that. So after 12 weeks, what we saw was kind of like all boats rose. Everybody did better. The exciting part about it, though, was we saw 48% increase in kids in the Proficient range for their visual motor skills. And so it was really a great success with that.
Jayson Davies
So first of all, two comments, and I think we'll, we'll head into the screeners versus the interventions next, just because that's where we're already going. First of all, I did not think that the shapes would potentially be more challenging to a degree, it almost sounds like more cognitive load than the letters and numbers. You almost think about that being opposite given the developmental stages of writing. So that's very interesting. But I guess by time you get into kinder, first second grade, kids are doing a lot of, a lot of writing, of letters and numbers and maybe less shapes at that point.
Heather Donovan
Well, and yeah, and I'm sorry, I just want to point out, though, when we're talking about the shapes assessment, you know, like, some of those shapes on the VMI, they're not, we're not talking Like, triangle, square, circle, you know, we're talking they get to some pretty complex shapes that some of these students have never seen before, but that's kind of the point, right? You're trying to see if these students can look at something they've never seen before and then copy it, you know? So I think that's why that particular assessment is probably more challenging.
Jayson Davies
Makes sense.
Karen Silberman
Well, yeah, she's exactly right. And it was done intentionally. Jayson, so the shapes test was intentionally created so that we do have a higher ceiling than, like the VMI, where the VMI, I mean, I was a psych at the high school for a period where I, I did not use the VMI on those kids, because it just it couldn't give me any more information, so I used other measures with them. But what we did was create this higher ceiling so that this can be used on on an adult population, so that if you're looking at someone with Alzheimer's, or, you know, other kinds of issues that could be coming up, we want to be able to target those, those higher ages and kind of more ability, so that as people Age, then it's still a strong tool to use, yeah,
Jayson Davies
the, I think it was the very last tool of the ravma still haunts me, like the 3d l looking shape, whatever it is, yeah, so that that's great that you were able to raise that ceiling. I think that's important. You want to be able to show true ability and not max out at a 3d square or something like that, which kids actually do work on sometimes in school. So awesome. All right. Well, let's lean into the screen, air tools. I feel like you've already teased this a lot, and we talked about a little bit, but I'm really excited, especially Karen, by what you were saying, where you've already seen teachers using this they want more, and that everyone is showing growth. So I think let's start with you mentioned that it includes letters, shapes and numbers. Does it include the whole gamut, or is it like a subsection of those,
Karen Silberman
right? And just to be clear, so the screener we had hoped it would be available. Now it's because I said it's really complex to create this stuff. We've actually had to push it out. We're looking at a March 15 date. Now I'm not sure you know when this airs, but that's, that's when we're looking at the launch date for it. Um. Um, the screener tool does involve letters, shapes and numbers. It's all three in the test. And with that, then the teachers will get or OTs. Actually. OTs are really interested in this too, and we have had OTs who have gotten so frustrated with their referrals that they've gotten. They said, we're just going to take the simmark test before we created the screener. We're going to take this and give it to all kindergarten students, because I'm so tired so but then it's, it's a lot for them to, you know, take in all this data and and then really look at the whole class, so we've helped them on that end. But what the screener tool will do is to do it automatically in the app. So what you'll get is, for each child, those individual results. So what range is the child falling in? And then it will explain that range. It will explain this child's strengths and weaknesses, and then it will give interventions. Now that the interventions, and this came directly from being asked by teachers. Okay, this is really interesting, but now, what do I do? Right? And that's why having Heather there was so incredibly important, because what, what we did in Mountain View was Heather. Could say, these are the interventions I recommend for all, all kids, you know. But some teachers said, Okay, I'm going to use these just with my intervention group. Some teachers said, I'm going to use it across the board. The exciting news we saw, you know, like growth with everybody, but the interventions are not super complicated. They're things that teachers can put in place, but it is targeting for that child, those individual results. So if they're having problems with rotation, it's going to give an intervention that directly works on rotation or scale, whatever it is, and then they can see their whole class list and say, Okay, this is how everybody did, and look at it that way. Or they can go in and look at individual results,
Jayson Davies
wow. Okay, I was going to ask you that then, okay, does it give you, like a whole class picture or individual, but it's both. It's both. It's both. Wow, yeah, sorry. I'm processing all of this right now because occupational therapy practitioner, I'm going to focus on on that, obviously, because that's who I know when I talk to you. Have two very different trains of thoughts when it comes to screening processes. And I'm sure both of you have kind of learned this over time, right? You have some people who think of a screening as almost a precursor to an evaluation for an individual student, and then you have the other, the other train of thought where a screening process is like the entire classroom, it's for a larger population, not an individual. And I lean toward that second aspect, where a screening is designed to be for an entire population. And so when I talk about screenings, I often talk about an occupational therapy practitioner going into the classroom and kind of getting a general sense of the entire classroom, not an individual student. So I like this because as an OT consulting with the teacher, if they've done this tool, they can a send me the results for the entire classroom, and I can provide general strategies. But if they they being the teacher, screen the entire classroom, they now have some data to share with me about an individual child as well if an evaluation is warranted, therefore, I am not needed for the screening process, per se, only to help them with the interventions which we're going to talk about in the moment. It sounds like Heather's already done some of that, but it takes out that need for me to go in and observe Johnny right like before he's on an IEP and kind of determine if he needs an OT evaluation. It's kind of this tool, to a degree, does some of that. So yeah, I know there's no real question there, but I'm just kind of giving my thoughts as to what I'm thinking about as thinking about as as an OT practitioner. I don't know if anything I said led to something you want to say. Well,
Heather Donovan
I wanted to I, you know, school districts, they use these kind of tools for other areas, right? Like, I ready Dora Adam to monitor things like reading, literacy, math. It highlights all these different areas on what they can do. And all these tools kind of come up with interventions, right? The intervention groups and who needs to work on decoding versus comprehension, and so it's, I just kind of see this toll similar, but looking at the visual motor skills side of it, right? So that's kind of how I would how. Yeah, I guess that's kind of how I visualize it being used. Yeah,
Karen Silberman
yeah. I mean that that is what we're looking at. And when we talk to school districts about it, we talk about research. Like I said, we are always going back to research. So the research, there's a high correlation between visual, motor skills and reading. So if a child is having visual motor problems, then there may be other kinds of problems with reading. This is also we're looking at this correlation in that in the state of California, starting this fall, all districts will have to give dyslexia screeners. So this we're looking at Cy Marc as being a tool that can go hand in hand. So we're looking at the teachers can look at dyslexia along with we're not calling it dysgraphia, but it's really like we we know that these two pieces go hand in hand, and so, so it's really giving that information about the individual child, but also, like as a group, how are people doing? And also, I think what's important to know too, is that our what we're looking at for our norms too, when we come out with the standardized version is that this will be post COVID, you know? So these are all post COVID norms. The norms from the VMI are the most recent ones are from 2010 and so when you look at like, Okay, what, because we, what we've seen, too, is a change in kids, visual motor skills, even since COVID And so our our norms are going to be very, very accurate in terms of what's happening now.
Jayson Davies
Wow. And Mrs. Smith or Mr. Johnson will like, immediately know whether or not the students one standard deviation, two standard deviations, or however you want to, in the 25th percentile, 17th percentile, whatever it might be. And the occupational therapy practitioner can work with the teacher and say, hey, if they're in the 25th to 40th percentile, use the interventions. If they're in the 10th percentile, let me know. Contact me. I want to be more impacted. Yeah,
Karen Silberman
and that can be, that can be up to the OT or the district however they want to manage it, but it will show those kids who, yeah, the intervention ranges that lower 10th percentile. And what Heather and I saw was that lower 10th percentile, Heather already knew most of those students, right. Wow. So, so, yes, so that's, that's what we're we're aiming for
Jayson Davies
quick side note, how often do you hope or think that you might be able to update norm?
Karen Silberman
Well, because we're the data is being collected constantly, then the norms, what we're looking at is really probably every year or two years that the norms can be updated, because as that data pool grows, then it will, you know, they will shift slightly, right, slightly, so we're not going to make changes for really tiny differences. But that that's another benefit of of the technology, is that we have this constant look at the changes, and so we can look at while the data is there's we're really highly aware of privacy, and so it's all disaggregated. We're not looking at any individual child or person, but we can look at the data as a whole, and then be able to see how how different ages are doing, and we will be able to compare that over time.
Jayson Davies
That's just mind blowing when you when you consider that or compare that to traditional pencil, paper assessment tools and whatnot, and a lot of tools end up, I don't want to say they die, but they end up no longer being used because they don't have updated norms, or the fan base is very frustrated that they haven't updated norms, and so that kind of is going to, for the time being, completely eliminate that difficulty with you, because you can, with sign market can, you can update it as necessary. So. So fantastic. Wow. I want to get into the interventions, but before I do anything else related to the screening process that we haven't covered.
Heather Donovan
So one of the things that I had brought up was, you know, the administering the test super fast, administering the scoring super fast, entering the demographic data. That's what was kind of the challenge for the teachers, right? They don't have like to like as an OT or assessing one student at a time. It's easy, you know, to enter that stuff in, but for a teacher to have to enter it for all of her students, that's a lot. And so I don't know if, Karen, you want to speak to some of the ways you're addressing this.
Karen Silberman
Yeah. So again, we're always listening and, and we're looking for stops, right? Like, what is the stop? What? What is the challenge here? And, and so it became apparent to us where, whereas OTs and psychs, we're used to entering demographic data for individual kids, but an entire class for a teacher is really time consuming, and especially if we want a whole all TK or all all tk to second grade teachers. So what we've done is that we would, we've developed a secure tool for districts to upload their data, so that will be part of the screener as well. We're going to have a toolbox that comes out with the screener, and part of it is that they will be able to upload their data all at once into a secure portal that then is sent to our team to download that data so that they when the teacher opens her iPad, her students are already there. They're already there, ready to go. So the easiest way to do that is to work with the tech department in any district so that we can upload that information. First, get the teachers ready to go, and then they will they will be able to access their their students. The other thing that we've added in to the screener is that teachers will be able to then after their school year is over, they can delete that class so they can bring a new class on board, but along. So that's one of the pieces that will come with the screener. And as I mentioned, we'll have a little toolbox. Because the other piece that we're finding is it's great. I love going out and training and being there in person and working with people in person. But the reality is now we have people in Rhode Island and in Massachusetts. And, you know, like, I would love to fly to all these places, but it's just really not feasible. So, so what we will put out with the toolbox, is what we're working on is, so when you first open the screener, it will have kind of an intro into this is how it works, but it will also come with a little training video, and then the ability to, you know, all their data will be uploaded. So we have all of these pieces, and they'll get a manual. I forgot the manual piece, so there will be a manual, like all of these pieces set up for teachers to be successful or OTs. Because, honestly, what I mostly have on my list of people who are, I've got a waiting list for the screener, are OTs. So we've got a lot of OTs just waiting to get this going in their districts. Yeah,
Jayson Davies
I think you're going to have a lot of OTs that that test it out, love it, and then fight hard for for the teachers to start using it and the districts to start using it. I'm assuming this can work both ways, but you can either pass one iPad around or log into several iPads and have all the kids take it up once. Or does it need to be one iPad kind of be passed around.
Karen Silberman
It's really it. So what? It isn't? So I should clarify this. It's not on the kids iPad. So if you have a class where, oh, all of my kids have iPads, it's not, it's not, it's really not for the kids to have. It's on the teacher's iPad. So the teacher's iPad. So maybe the teacher, and if she has an assistant, then they have it on their iPads, and they do what we've done with the testing, because I have a school that said we really need help with the testing. So we went in, helped with the testing. And again, at this point, we can do this, because we're, you know, yeah, but with that, what we found is you need to have a small group, so a group of kids, maybe three, maybe four, depending. I found, you know, kindergarteners can be well, like we saw with your son, right? They're very, very busy. And then you you have them go through the testing that way. Yeah. Yeah, so it's very fast for the kids. The kids have no problem with it. And I can say too that with our tests, we have OTs that have said, this is the only test where I've gotten any kind of result where if the kids who maybe are in the specialized autism program where they're not using any kind of pencil or paper, they refuse and have all kinds of behaviors. They can give them the iPad and get some kind of results to see, you know, how, how the child is doing. I love
Jayson Davies
that, because I kind of envision right like a paraprofessional or even the occupational therapy practitioner coming in, potentially sitting at the back table and just kind of one kid at a time, really quickly comes over five, seven minutes, whatever it takes, next, next, next, maybe it has to happen in three different sittings, but relatively quickly still. And to be honest, as an occupational therapy practitioner, I would probably be happy to help a teacher get this done, because I know the impact that it will have on potentially reducing my referrals. It might allow me to better support the teacher, so that I can again reduce the referrals that I get and help more kids at the same time. So with that, you did talk about some of the treatment piece side of things. And so when you get a screening results back, it sounds like you get a individual screening for individual student, but you also get the full class screening results per se. So when it comes to the interventions, is it more based upon the full class? Is it more based upon the individual or both? No,
Karen Silberman
it's individually based. So the the interventions were developed and actually ran them by Heather and our other OTs, who are, who are advising us. And the interventions are, are specific to the individual child. And I can say the interventions, though, are things that you could do with the whole class that they're nothing, they're not what an OT is going to pull out and do, like, really specific, but it's specific enough for that child where this is where they're having trouble. So this is an intervention that you could do with the trial,
Jayson Davies
gotcha very cool. And, Heather, I don't know if you have anything to add, kind of just what it's looked like for you. As OT,
Heather Donovan
yeah. So one of the things I noticed with the tool is, I don't know that a lot of the other assessments look at speed, right, the importance of and how that impacts. And what I noticed is that a lot of my kids, I'm like, they are just too fast, you know, and there's a lot of nuance reasons for that, like it being non preferred, or they have a hard time with mid range control or grading force, and, you know, they're just wanting to get it over with. But still, it made me realize, well, yeah, these kids are all just kind of rushing through. They're not going to get that distal control. So I say this because then it made me design more interventions that work on getting kids to slow down right. It's just and really working on that precision, the start stop. And then I also I did it on a larger scale. So I, once a month, I go into all the SDC classes and do like a full class lesson. And so this last month, I did it and targeted going fast and slow, and teaching them we really want to go slow, you know, when we're starting with this letter formation. So that's just one thing this tool pointed out to me that I hadn't really looked at, was the importance of speed. And so now I'm starting to get kids to try to slow down a little bit when they're working on those early, pre writing and writing skills.
Jayson Davies
Again, I just think this is going to be amazing. I think the data that you all are already getting and the data that you're going to get going forward is going to be amazing. And Karen and Heather and the others that are on the team, I hope that you will like, go to OT and go to a OTA and like present some of these findings, because I think it would be amazing to see Heather talking about, well, see this student scored really low on this and this and this, but they were high on the speed and kind of see some of the correlations that exist. And I think it's going to be a data that we've all wanted for a long time, but but have never been able to actually see because we didn't have a tool, a tool to do it, and now we have that tool, so I can't wait to see what comes of cymarq, and the future of cymarq, and how it evolves over time. And so Karen and Heather, I want to thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. And Karen really quickly, we will definitely post a link to the YouTube video that kind of gives a short, you know, intro or an overview. It really just kind of shows you what it looks like when you're in when you're in the app. But where can everyone go to learn more about cymar? Right?
Karen Silberman
So I am going to jump in here because we do have, like I've said before, we have, we're based in research. So I want to give some hot off the press findings that we have, too in research. So with that, we are conducting a concurrent validity study, and with that study, we are finding a moderately high correlation between the simmark tests and the VMI and so with that, it's really showing that like it's this growing body of evidence where, yes, this is a tool that is commensurate, or better than than what's available now. So very excited about about that. And then we would love to hear from your listeners. They can email me directly at karen@simmark.io, we're happy to give them a free 90 day trial of progress monitoring. If they're interested in bringing the screener to their districts, we'll also provide them a free trial. So with that and research, I keep coming back to that if they're interested in doing research, we'd love to join with them. In fact, we have an OT who went to one of our trainings, and she is now, she's in New Mexico, and she's she's doing research with us, so we'd love to do that too. So just go to our website@simmark.io we're also on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook. We post every week. So we'd love to have you follow us and connect with us. So yeah, we'd love to, we'd love to have more OTs join us and also listen to their feedback.
Jayson Davies
Fantastic. Well, thank you both. We really appreciate it, and we'll definitely stay in touch and learn more.
Heather Donovan
Okay, great. Thanks, Jayson, thanks. Jayson,
Jayson Davies
thank you. All right, and that wraps us up for today. Please help me to thank Karen and Heather one more time for introducing us all to cymar if you want to learn more about the simmark tools and screeners, you can check them out@cymarq.io I've also linked in the show notes to a video on YouTube that provides a two minute demo for the testing and scoring using the cymarq apps. After recording, Karen also reached out and wanted to give a big thank you to therapro for helping them to roll out cymarq. Therapro has additional webinars that show exactly how the simmark apps work. I highly recommend giving them a watch. I believe there's two of them from back in 2024 and yeah, it'll just really give you a chance to look and see what the app looks like. As always. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you feel as inspired as I do by the potential of these digital tools to make what we do more efficient while also providing us with more usable data. There were some things here with cymarq that it can do that we would never be able to do with the VMI. And if you're excited to use the simmark apps for your evaluations, for your screenings, to help your teachers, be sure to forward this episode to an OT colleague so they can learn about it too. Thank you once again for tuning in, and we'll see you in the next episode.
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