PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENTS

This usually includes:

  • Intake interviews
  • Observations (during assessment or in class)
  • Various psychometric instruments including:
    • Cognitive/ individual intelligence tests
    • Educational assessment (reading, writing, spelling and mathematical ability)
    • Socio-emotional assessment (to determine what is happening in the emotional and social context in which the child functions)
    • Assessment of visual- and auditory perception (which forms the basis for learning)
    • Behavioural assessment and Functional Behaviour Assessment
    • Neuropsychological assessments

 The psycho-educational assessments look at these four levels of functioning:

1. Emotional functioning

This is done using a range of projective techniques

  • Evaluating a child’s self- esteem/self-concept
  • How a child feels in relation to his/her family
  • A child’s emotional experience of school
  • How the child feels in his/her relationships with peers
  • To determine a child’s current level of emotional and behavioural functioning
  • How all the above influences the child’s functioning both on an educational level and cognitively

2. Cognitive functioning

  • Using the cognitive assessment as a measure of functioning, incorporating both verbal and non-verbal aspects. This will give an indication of a child’s strengths and weaknesses.

3. Developmental functioning

  • Various areas of development are evaluated, including intellectual functioning, receptive and expressive language, attention, memory, information processing, and adaptive functioning and visual-motor integration.

4. Educational functioning

  • This gives an indication of how a child is functioning with school tasks like mathematics, reading, writing and spelling. It can help identify areas of weakness and how remedial interventions can be used to improve the child’s performance at school and can help identify any learning disorders like dyslexia, written expression etc.

The assessment process:

  1. The child’s parent(s) / primary caregiver connect with me providing information regarding the specific need.
  2. An assessment date is scheduled for the child/adolescent.
  3. Forms to obtain background information from the school and parent are sent to the parents.
  4. After approximately 1 week of the assessment, a feedback session is scheduled, where the results of the assessment are explained and recommendations are discussed.
  5. A meeting with the teacher is scheduled to give feedback and to discuss the assessment results.

A written report is provided to the parents as soon as possible.