Psychoeducational Assessment
A psychoeducational assessment can help to determine someone's learning style. For children, an assessment can demonstrate strengths and weaknesses in academic areas. They can identify problems that may interfere with academic progress. Similarly, for adults, assessments can determine if there are issues that might interfere with progress in an educational setting or might interfere with performance in the work place.
A psychoeducational assessment will look at a person's ability and their actual achievement. Ability is measured by an intelligence test where a series of subtests tapping different skill areas is given. These subtest scores are combined to show different aspects of intelligence. The main areas that are examined are Verbal Reasoning, Perceptual Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. If there are no major differences between the primary scores then a Full Scale IQ is calculated.
Once the ability level is determined, an achievement test will be used to measure actual achievement in Reading, Mathematics, Oral Language, and Written Language. These scores will give a profile of a person's strength and weaknesses.
It will also become clear whether further assessment needs to be conducted. When a person has an identified reading problem, I will administer a test of auditory processing. This test looks at how a person processes language information once it has gone past the ear. I recommend that people have a hearing test to determine that they do not have a generalized hearing loss. This is necessary before diagnosing an auditory processing disorder.
Specific problems are examined with appropriate tests to determine why an academic area may be a problem.
The process of doing a psychoeducational assessment starts when someone calls my office. I will attempt to find out if there have been any previous assessments, the results of those assessments, specific problems that a parent has noticed in their child or an adult has noticed in themselves, and what steps they have taken previously to solve the problem.
When it is a parent referring a child, I will most often meet with the parents first to get a picture of the issues they see with their child and to find out what they have tried previously to remediate the problems they identified.
I welcome inquiries about my procedures for conducting psychoeducational assessments.
