Psycho-Educational assessments help parents and teachers understand how a child learns best.
Some of the reasons that children may need psycho-educational assessments include:
- If they seem much more capable than their marks reflect
- If their marks have suddenly dropped without obvious reason
- To check whether they have a learning difficulty and if so, how best to help them overcome it
- If their teacher thinks they will do better with an exam concession. Exam concessions can come in many forms. Extra time for a child who struggles to finish his work in time. Having someone read the exam questions for a child who battles to read. Allowing children with poor handwriting to type their answers instead. And many more, depending on the child’s needs.
Psycho-educational assessments for Primary School children usually look at the following three areas:
- A cognitive/intellectual assessment. This helps to identifies verbal and non-verbal perceptual reasoning abilities, working memory skills and processing speed.
- A battery of academic tests. These provides a measure of the child’s current level of development in Reading, Spelling/Phonics, Comprehension, Written Expression and Mathematics.
- An emotional screening
Sometimes, we might include tests of auditory or visual perceptual skills. We do this when we suspect a child might not be hearing or seeing exactly what is being presented to them. Auditory and Visual perceptual skills have to do with far more than the ability to see and hear. Instead it relates to how the brain interprets information from the eyes and ears.
The end result:
With this information a cognitive and academic profile can be drawn up for your child. Once we know what your child’s strengths and weaknesses are, we can start to tailor his learning so it suits his individual style better. Understanding where your child is at emotionally is equally important. If your child is feeling unhappy, sad or unsure of his abilities these feelings will probably impact on his ability to learn.
Our assessments are aligned with the requirements set out by the Department of Education as well as the Independent Examinations Board (IEB)