Tag Archives: Evaluations

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!!!!!

When Would A Psychoeducational Evaluation Be Most Useful

A psychoeducational evaluation would be appropriate in situations where a student continues to experience academic difficulties after various interventions have been attempted (e.g., parent/school conferences, tutoring, study skills, behavior modification, etc.). Another situation would be when parents and/or teachers observe major discrepancies over time in academic performance (e.g., from day to day or between subject areas). A psychoeducational evaluation is usually required for college when a student needs documentation for educational accommodations for learning disabilities and ADHD.

What are the purposes of a psychoeducational evaluation?

A psychoeducational evaluation is often conducted in order to determine whether a specific learning or other disability (e.g., ADHD) may be impacting significantly on a student’s academic performance. . For instance, the presence of a learning disability, attention deficit disorder, or emotional disorder can result in a great deal of academic frustration and inability for a student to perform at his/her level of innate potential. For example, it has been estimated that 1 5 to 20% of students are learning disabled. A learning disability is diagnosed when assessment results reveal a significant discrepancy (difference) between a student’s scores on achievement tests (in reading, mathematics and/or written language) and his/her educational expectancy range (based upon age, educational background and intelligence).

In addition to determining whether a student has a specific disability that impacts upon learning, plainly stated a psychoeducational evaluation gives a good indication of how a student learns best (i.e., his/her learning style (profile). Once the teacher, parent and student are empowered with this knowledge they can make adjustments in order to maximize the student’s learning potential. Often when students can learn to understand their strengths and weaknesses as opposed to global assessments they may have internalized regarding their learning abilities (e.g., dumb, smart, average) they can be able to reduce feelings of academic frustration, while improving self-esteem.

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.