Learning Assessments for Your Child
There are different types of learning assessments for your child. If your child is struggling in school, you may be encouraged to get an assessment to help discern how to help and better understand what is happening.
But do you need an assessment that provides a diagnosis like ADHD or dyslexia or a cognitive skills assessment?
What are assessments about? What learning assessments for your child are ideal?
It’s like going to the doctor to get a baseline as to how tall you are, your blood pressure, weight, etc.
A cognitive skills assessment will identify your child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Does your child have strong or weak long-term memory, working memory, processing speed, reasoning, visual and auditory processing?
However, if you are seeking a diagnosis, you need to work with a licensed psychologist who can administer the extensive testing required to diagnose as this cannot be done with subtests. This requires a comprehensive set of tests to help determine a diagnosis.
If you go through this testing and your child is given a diagnosis like ADHD, dyslexia, autism, etc. you may be wondering, now what?
There are 2 main approaches:
You will find in the summary report you are provided that the recommendations on the back pages relate mainly to what are called accommodations – these are also referred to as IEPs or 504 plans. Accommodations are ways to make modifications for your child to help schoolwork be easier. For example, a child with ADHD is often given an accommodation to complete work in a quiet area or have more time to complete their work. These strategies make schoolwork easier and less stressful but are not improving attention skills or strengthening processing speed. They are not addressing the root cause, but more “accommodating” the weaknesses.
My wife and I went this route with our youngest daughter, Catie. Catie had a full neuropsychic evaluation that diagnosed her with ADHD, receptive and expressive language delays and sensory integration disorder. She was provided a list of accommodations including – being given more time for her tasks, less homework (she would receive fewer and easier spelling words than her peers, would often have instructions read to her and could do her work in a quiet area). We were also encouraged to put her on ADHD medication. When we asked for other options, these are the only strategies they recommended so we tried given this was the advice from her doctor. However, Catie had bad reactions to her ADHD meds and we also started to realize that her IEP was not addressing her difficulties, just accommodating them. This is the main reason my wife and I decided to open our LearningRx centers as we knew Catie did not need to be accommodated but given the skills to cope and keep up.
The alternate approach is to train and strengthen the weak cognitive skills vs. accommodate. This is what a cognitive skills assessment at LearningRx will enable. It will identify why your child is struggling and how that diagnosis is manifesting (if they have a diagnosis). For example, most students with ADHD have weaknesses in processing speed. In fact, this skill is often the root cause of many attention issues. This was also one of our daughter’s weakest skills. By strengthening her processing speed and other skills, she has been off medication for years and just received her college degree!
It is similar with dyslexia. Dyslexia usually shows up as weaknesses in long-term memory and visual processing – hindering word recognition – and auditory processing – hindering blending and decoding. To improve dyslexia symptoms, the best approach is to address these root causes.
Full neuropsych evaluations can be helpful and provide a diagnosis, but the question becomes, “what are you going to do about it? “. If you would prefer to address the root cause vs. accommodate the issues, call LearningRx in Eagan today to schedule an initial assessment and learn more.
