Understanding the Benefits of Psychological and Educational Assessments for Your Child
- Kristy McConnell, R. Psych.
- Mar 11, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 15
Sometimes our children do not seem as successful at school as we hope for. They might struggle with reading, writing, or math. Perhaps your child’s teacher has brought up concerns. A learning assessment, can also be called a psychoeducational assessment or psychological and educational assessment. During the assessment, we take a deep dive into your child’s abilities in order to provide a shared understanding of their strengths and areas of growth.
What areas could be looked at during a psychological and educational assessment?
Intellectual development
The assessment will usually involve an intelligence test, also known as an IQ test, to help us understand your child’s cognitive potential.
Academic achievement
We also look at areas that would benefit from an assessment of your child’s reading, writing and mathematics in order to determine if there may be a potential learning difficulty that is getting in the way.
Social and emotional development
If you are concerned about the way your child feels their emotions, or connects with others, we will look into where they might benefit from support based on their experiences and what strategies might be best.
Life skill development
If your child seems to struggle in many areas of their day-to-day living, we may also have a look at their adaptive skills.
Executive functioning
Perhaps you are concerned that your child is not developing the skills needed to problem solve, set goals, think ahead, switch tasks, or manage their time. This is also an area we can look at within an assessment.
What questions might be answered with a learning assessment?
Does my child have a learning disability?
What supports does my child need at school?
Will they be able to receive accommodations for their learning struggles?
What are their areas of strength and areas for growth?
What can I do to help my child?
What potential diagnoses might come out of the assessment, if any?
Specific learning disorders in reading, writing or math
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
Intellectual disability
Anxiety or depressive disorders
No diagnosis, but a better understanding of their areas of strength and growth
What does a psychoeducational assessment involve?
Typically when we start a psychoeducational assessment, we meet with you in order for you to learn about the assessment process prior to consenting. This will also help you to know the potential risks and benefits of moving forward. We will then obtain a thorough history of your child’s development so far. This may also involve speaking with other important people in your child’s life. This will help us to further refine our assessment questions and plan.
We will then work with your child and complete the assessment measures that we have chosen. We use standardized assessment tools in order to understand how your child’s abilities compare to others their age. Completing the assessment measures with your child may be completed over a single day, or could be broken up into multiple sessions. This is dependant on each child. Once this is complete, we will begin the work of gathering all of the assessment information together into a report that you will receive.
Finally, we will meet with you to go over the results and any questions you may have, and collaboratively decide how to share the information with your child and their educational team. The whole process can take anywhere from 10-20 hours depending on the referral questions and assessment plan. Our psychologists charge the Psychological Association of Alberta’s recommended hourly rate . We would be happy to provide a free 15-min phone consultation to see if a psychoeducational assessment might be a worthwhile endeavour for your child and your family.
We would love to hear from you if you think an assessment might be right for your child.
