Tag Archives: Academic

Five Fun Ways to Keep Your Child Learning and Engaged during the Summer

1. Cooking. Children love to cooking with their parents. This is a fun activity for children and involves learning about measurement, step-by-step instructions, reading, counting, and self-monitoring.

2. Help plan the family vacation. By having your child help plan the family vacation he/she can learn about budgeting, using maps, planning and compromising on the selected activities. Once the destination is agreed upon, the internet and vacation pamphlets can be read to research the area, activities and history.

3. Create a summer scrapbook. Your child may enjoy creating a scrapbook of his/her favorite summer activities. Photos, drawing, thoughts and memories could be written to practice writing skills.

4. Join a local library program. Many local libraries provide programs for summer reading that include suggested books along with goals and rewards for book completion(s). This gives children additional incentives for reading and makes it a fun and rewarding summer activity.

5. Plan a summer field trip. Have your child plan a summer field trip with friends and/or neighbors to a museum, zoo, or nature center. This can help your child develop skills for organization, time management, communication and research.
Have a great summer and remember that learning can always be fun!!!!!

What is a Psychoeducational Evaluation

A psychoeducational evaluation is a comprehension assessment of a student’s functioning in three primary areas that impact learning and academic functioning. These areas, which include: 1) learning aptitude; 2) basic academic skill development; and 3) personality/adjustment factors, will be described below.

1. Tests of Learning Aptitude – (also called intelligence (IQ) tests, cognitive processing tests) investigate a student’s abilities on measures of verbal linguistic skills (long-term memory, abstract reasoning, vocabulary development, comprehension, and auditory short-term memory) as well as non­ verbal skills (visual organization and memory, nonverbal reasoning, planning ability, visual motor coordination, spatial visualization ability, and short-term visual memory). Supplemental cognitive (aptitude) tests are given to further investigate any problem areas based on in-take information and observations (e.g., attention, organization, visual-auditory associative memory, processing speed, auditory (phonological processing), long-term retrieval, visuo-spatial memory and fluid reasoning, etc.).

2. Tests of Academic Skill Development – investigate a student’ s skills in the areas of reading, written language and mathematics. Within each of these academic domains, the student is tested on measures of basic skills development and higher level application and reasoning skills. For example, reading tests assess word decoding, phonetic skills, word identification, fluency/rate and comprehension.

3. Test of Personality/Adjustment Factors – investigate a student’s functioning with regard to the development of his/her academic coping strategies. One’s functioning in this regard is sometimes affected by self-esteem, anxiety, internal pressure, motivational levels, etc. that are assessed during the psychoeducational evaluation. Students are also screened for emotional distress (e.g., anxiety, depression) during this portion of the test.