Kris Schoenenberger-Gross

School psychologist Kris Schoenenberger-Gross testified for the defense in Brendan Dassey's trial on Day 6, identifying his school records and reading from his education and speech-language evaluations. The 2005 speech-language report described difficulties with comprehension, vocabulary, and memory and gave an overall language score of 66. The court overruled the State's relevance objection to testimony about a 2004 individualized education program, while cautioning against repetition from older records.

On cross-examination, Kratz asked what the school records showed about Dassey's abilities and suggestibility. Schoenenberger-Gross said the district did not consider him cognitively disabled and identified average-range thinking and a 2002 math score. She distinguished memory for classroom learning from memory of lived events, which she had not tested. She also said the records did not flag being easily influenced as an area of concern; a teacher's note that Dassey shrugged when he did not know an answer did not say he invented one.

On redirect, Schoenenberger-Gross described a 2002 General Intellectual Ability score of 78 as borderline to below average, a fourth-percentile cognitive efficiency score, and a short-term memory assessment in the well-below-average-to-borderline range. She said Dassey sometimes guessed on uncertain test items and read from a 2005 IEP that placed his reading at an end-of-fourth-grade level while he was in tenth grade. Over the State's objection, the court allowed that IEP questioning and then received the identified school-record exhibits for the reasons they were used.