Tips for good assessment and report writing - 2

This is the second of a few  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.

Consider your assessment  breadth

If there is broad and detailed information about the child from school or from a didactic assessment – it's not always advisable to repeat the reading/writing/math assessment.  It is important to assess all cognitive abilities (fluid ability, short term memory, processing speed, auditory processing, visual processing, long term storage and retrieval, comprehension-knowledge) when the assessment's goal is to determine if the child has learning disability and if so – what is the child's deficient cognitive process.    It is important to assess all cognitive abilities when you want to understand and "map" the child's "cognitive profile" – his cognitive strengths and weaknesses.  But if the assessment question is about emotional/personality issues or, for example, about school readiness, it's not always necessary to conduct a thorough cognitive assessment. 

When assessing the cognitive abilities, it's enough to assess each broad ability by two tests, and add a third test only if the two tests yield widely different results.  Usually, there's no need to assess the same thing several times (for example, usually there's no need to assess rapid naming of pictures as well as letters, numbers and mixed categories).

I'll add, that in order to answer many assessment questions (for example, why does the child have difficulties with single word decoding?) it's advisable to focus first on specific tests that can answer these questions (in this case, phonological coding tests (that measure a narrow ability within auditory ability) and rapid naming tests (that measure a narrow ability within long term storage and retrieval)).  In light of these test's results, you can consider whether and how to broaden the assessment..