Education Assessments
How can an Education Assessment help my child?
By assessing various areas of mental functioning, education assessments help parents and educators gain insight to a child’s unique learning capacity and academic abilities, allowing them to make informed choices about a child’s ideal learning environment and their individual learning needs.
Parents typically become interested in an education assessment for their child for a couple of different reasons. Perhaps the child’s school has requested an assessment or suggested that there may be issues in a child’s learning ability. Perhaps you’ve noticed that your child is facing challenges in learning which may be due to an undetected cognitive deficit, intellectual difficulty, or expressive language difficulty, just to name a few..
The stage when this is often highlighted is in late primary school or early high school.
What process do we undertake during an education assessment for my child?
- Conduct the assessment
- Provide a written report for the parents
- Conduct a feedback session with parents (parents may choose for this to take place in the school)
- Provide recommendations for the child (both Educational and Social / Emotional / Behavioural)
There are different assessments that can be done. We usually start with an overall cognitive assessment and then conduct an assessment on a variety of areas to look at the strengths and weaknesses within your child’s learning abilities. As a result, we identify the specific areas that children need support in and how parents and teachers can best support them.
In Australia, learning materials are provided to students on an incremental basis. What this means is that if a child misses out on understanding a particular stage of these learning materials for any reason, then it will make the subsequent stages of that topic harder to grasp. The assessment process assists in identifying any areas that a child may not have grasped; the subsequent report then offers recommendations to support in correcting this and enhancing the child’s learning capacity.
Normally, the feedback is provided directly to parents. If parents wish for the school to be more involved, teachers are welcome to join us at our office to facilitate a discussion in the one session. For an additional fee, further feedback can also be provided directly to the school after the parent feedback session has occurred.
Through undertaking an education assessment, you will understand your child’s academic level, the areas of strengths and weaknesses, any areas for improvement and how to best support them to achieve enhanced learning outcomes.