What is the Value of a Psycho-Educational Assessment?

 

As if the phrase “psycho-educational assessment” wasn’t intimidating enough, a psychoeducational assessment in Calgary is sometimes referred to as a psych-ed eval or neuropsych eval. None of those names are particularly helpful for indicating how a psycho-educational assessment near you can help your child, or what they include. That’s the goal of this article: to explain what a psych-ed assessment includes and why they may be valuable for your child, her teachers, and your family.

What is a psychoeducational assessment?

A psychoeducational assessment is a standardized assessment of a child’s intellectual, learning and academic abilities and capacities. Psych-ed assessments or performed by psychologists and psychometrists (someone who administers tests) performing psychology services near you, and who will perform interviews, observe your child in a variety of settings (home, school and social, and review medical and academic records relating to your child. The goal of a psych-ed assessment is to identify how your child learns — after all, not all children learn the same way — and how and where they struggle — because every child has strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding your child’s learning style, strengths and weaknesses will enable your child’s assessors to recommend learning and teaching strategies for parents, teachers and supports to boost your child’s strengths and build up your child’s weaknesses. In a phrase, the goal of a neuropsych eval is simple: To help your child reach her maximum learning and academic potential, a goal that can help your child at home, school and at play.

What is included in a psychoeducational assessment?

Just like no two children are the same, no two psychoeducational assessments are identical. A psychologist performing a psychoeducational assessment near you will develop and tailor the assessment process to your particular child, including to account for her age, emotional strengths, intellectual strengths, communication abilities and behavioural patterns. While assessments will vary from one to the next with the needs of each child and style of each assessor, each assessment will include the following components:

The assessor will conduct a background review, including interviews with the child’s parents and a review of the child’s academic records. The assessor may ask parents, teachers and the child to complete some checklists to serve as a guide to the assessor’s evaluation.

Your child’s cognitive skills will be assessed, meaning your assessor will measure and assess her reasoning, memory, working efficiency and her executive functions. Depending on your child’s age, the assessor will use different types of IQ tests in addition to non-IQ-focused normed tests for measuring a child's cognitive abilities. Ask your assessor to explain why they’ve chosen one test over another, since they’ll have access to a wide variety of resources.

Your assessor will conduct academic achievement testing to assess your child’s ability to read, write, spell, listen and to perform mathematical calculations. In some cases, the psychologist will use tests similar to those your child completes in school.

In addition to those school-like tests, your child’s assessor will perform projective personality and emotional testing tailored to your child’s age and emotional maturity. Projective testing options include exercises like drawing, storytelling, sentence completion or Rorschach (ink blot) tests. The goal of projective testing is to get to know your child emotionally, in addition to educationally or academically.

Depending on the particular needs and history of your child identified through the background checks and historical review, your assessor may perform specific additional tests to assess your child’s language skills, attention-holding ability, etc. These more specific tests are sometimes used to try and resolve inconsistencies in prior results, to fill gaps in information gleaned to date, or to confirm or rule out potential diagnoses.

The collection of data through all those steps will be supplemented by your assessor’s observations of your child at school, home and play. The goal of these observations is to understand your child’s social skills, strengths and weaknesses and to inform a fuller understanding of your child’s personality.

If your child’s teachers or doctor has suggested that she undergo a psycho-educational assessment or if you are concerned about your child’s academic performance, interest or frustrations, ask a firm providing psychology services in Calgary to explain how they can help your child reach her potential.