Tips for good assessment and report writing - 3

This is the third batch of a few such tips written by the assessment  team at the Jerusalem municipality educational psychology services.   The members of the team are:  Rita   Baumgarten, Hanna Brimer, Nadine Caplan , Eynat  Cohen Rahman , Etti Daniel Simon , Uri Dar ,  Michelle Lisses Topaz, Betty Netzer, Ruth Oman Shaked , Adina Sacknovitz , Smadar Sapir Yogev, Anan Srour   and  Dahlia Zayit.

Without deviating from standard test administration procedures, choose the tests and their  administration order flexibly and  in light of the child's characteristics. 

If you administer an entire intelligence test, consider   which  test  will best fit the child's characteristics or the referral issue (Israeli Educational psychologists currently have only Kaufman or Wechsler tests at their disposal).  Remember that the Wechsler test requires  more  verbal expression.  Also, you can ask the child which kind of task he'd like to begin with:  answering questions? Drawing or copying? Reading? Etc.  The child's choice is always interesting, and it's a good idea to ask him about the reasons for his choice.  It's always nice to begin with a task that will not be too frustrating for the child.

An adolescent  told me once, that he prefers beginning with verbal questions, because his previous assessment results showed that he is not good at visual processing.  This is valuable information  about  this teen's self perception, the weight of the assessment feedback, the teen's coping style and more.

Without deviating from standard test administration procedures, conduct a dynamic assessment

Remember, that your goal is not only to "measure" the child's performance, but also to understand how he thinks, how he sees things and what motivates him.  After completing the standard administration procedure, go back to the test or to specific test items and try to understand the child's inner theory that made him work the way he did.  This is possible through a dynamic assessment process that you can do with the child. 

Suppose the child answered a reading comprehension question wrongly, or made a mistake in a math word problem or arithmetic computation, or performed very well on the RCFT test.  You can ask him:  how did you reach this conclusion?  How did you approach this task?  Tell me what you thought, how did you understand this point in the text?  This way you'll be able to reveal what underlying assumptions the child applied when answering the question, or solving the math problem.  You'll reveal the way the child tackles and analyses complex visual stimuli.  Always assume the child works in light of an inner theory.  Revealing this theory will help you know where the child's difficulty lies and what he needs in order to overcome it.  Work with the child creatively, and try to find out in different ways what he needs in order to arrive at the right answer/solution/analysis of the stimulus.  Does he need to double check his work?  Does he need simpler instructions?  Does he need word definitions?  Does he need help in building hypotheses and drawing conclusions?  Etc.  In order to facilitate your thinking about what took place between you and the child in the assessment process, make a detailed protocol of this dynamic process.

Assessment is not only testing.  During assessment, have a conversation with the child and get to know him.  This conversation is an essential part of the assessment process.