What is The Point and Value of Psycho Educational Assessments?

Teachers and parents have at least one goal in common — that every child comfortably and confidently achieves their highest level of academic and personal success. There are multiple factors that affect every child’s experience of school, including personal and family factors, social influences, psychological and emotional conditions, economic circumstances, health-related conditions, and behavioural patterns. Psycho educational assessments are one kind of tool used to identify what supports might improve a child’s opportunities for success at school.

What are psycho educational assessments?

• Psycho educational assessments are a comprehensive evaluation of a child’s:
• Cognitive skills such as logical reasoning, attention, memory and executive functioning
• Academic knowledge relative to particular curricula
• Ability to function effectively socially, behaviourally and emotionally in a school setting and generally

A psychologists in Calgary will perform a psycho educational assessment by conducting interviews with the child, his parents, and his teachers. The psychologist will ask you for a lot of information about your child’s medical history, developmental history, behaviour at home and elsewhere, and family relationships and dynamics. The assessment will also include one-on-one testing sessions between the psychologist and the child, as well as discrete observations of the child. The assessment will also include a review of academic and appropriate medical records.

At the end of the psycho educational assessment in Calgary, the psychologist will produce a detailed report that describes your child’s weaknesses and strengths. It will include recommendations for building upon and taking advantage of your child’s strengths, and recommendations for addressing the areas that require improvement.

Three key benefits of psycho educational assessments

Assessments help to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses. Understanding her strengths and weaknesses allows her full support team to apply strategies to ensure she learns to her full potential by building on her strengths.

What does that mean in application? The information reported following a psycho educational assessment will be used to identify and to adapt the most appropriate strategies and resources to ensure your child learns. Similarly, educators and parents will discover what sort of environment and learning style fosters success and, conversely, what environments and styles should be avoided or adapted to your child’s needs.

The information gleaned from a psycho educational assessment can help to ensure that academic expectations being placed on your child are reasonable.

How do you know your child might need one?

There are three common indicators that your child may need to be assessed by a psychologist near you:

• If your child continues to struggle despite additional help and classroom accommodations by teachers and staff 
• A continuously worsening attitude toward school, including complete loss of interest and insistence by your child that he is bad at school 
• Persistently bad behaviour in school, especially if your child is disruptive at school but not at home, which may indicate your child is experiencing a learning disability and not a behavioural challenge
• Other indications of a possible learning disability, including acting out as a result of confusion, frustration, or in an effort to create a distraction from work or his struggles with it
• Inability to learn age-appropriate intellectual, behavioural, or social skills

Are you concerned about your child’s struggles at school, or has your child’s school recommended the development of an IEP or the conduct of a psycho educational assessment near you? We encourage you, in either situation, to reach out to a psychologists in Calgary with experience in conducting psycho educational assessments as early as issues of concern arise. They’ll be able to answer all your questions and ensure that you child benefits from an assessment as quickly and effectively as possible.