What is a Psycho-Educational Evaluation?

0:01 Hi everyone my name is Sally Roscher, I'm a licensed school psychologist and my practice is Measuring Minds. Today I wanted to go over "What is a psychoeducational evaluation?" Your child may have been referred for a psychoeducational evaluation due to learning or behavioral difficulties and I wanted to go over what is included in a psychoeducational evaluation. First I wanted to note that we want to always be providing individualized evaluations based on the child's concerns so although I'm going to go over a few common pieces the actual evaluation can look very different between different children,

0:54 based on the referral concerns. So the first area that I like to start with is the child's intellectual functioning so that is commonly known as the IQ test and this can give us a lot of really good information about the child's processing. The kind of IQ test that I like to use gives us information about the child's verbal abilities, nonverbal reasoning skills, and then other different cognitive processing: such as working memory, processing speed, visual processing, and auditory processing. Again, there's other pieces that can be added or taken away depending on what are the specific concerns. The next area that is included

1:48 in almost all psychoeducational evaluations is an academic component, because we want to see how is the child's learning and behavior affecting their academic skills. We can get academic achievement from a variety of different sources, so we want to be looking at the child's current report cards in grades, previous grades, and we'll look at the child's standardized State Testing; like the FAST test if you're in Florida, and we also have individual academic tests as well.

2:34 Again, depending on the concern, we would look into a full battery of reading so for example if dyslexia or a specific learning disability is the concern then we would definitely want to look into how the child reads words, how did they decode words, how is their reading fluency, how is that affecting their reading comprehension, phonology and phonological awareness skills - all of that would be included in the academic achievement piece of the evaluation. Now, depending on if there are also behavioral concerns which can include inattentiveness, hyperactivity, or even autism, which means that we would be looking at how does the child socialize,

3:27 how do they handle their emotions, that would be included in the behavior and social emotional piece and this can also include observations, so classroom observations, observations of the child in different kind of settings, so for example: in structured settings like the classroom and then even unstructured settings such as in the lunchroom, or at recess at the playground. That would all fall under the behavior piece of the evaluation and then finally, this can vary widely depending on the age and the area of concern, we may want to be looking into the child's

4:15 development so are they meeting develop early developmental Milestones? This would typically be done for a child younger than age five (five or younger) and or the child's Adaptive Behavior. So Adaptive Behavior would include self-care skills such as toileting, dressing, and how they play and interact with others. Again, this last piece can vary widely depending on the child's age, level of development, and the area of concern. These are some of the basic pieces of the psychoeducational evaluation and by gathering additional data from multiple sources can help

5:09 us determine um how the child learns the best and in what kind of environment it can help us identify if there's any learning disability going on or behavioral disorder going on and then what kind of accommodations and modifications that the child may need in the classroom. Thank you.