Assessment/Diagnosis
Many families begin their journey at our office seeking answers to the whys behind their child’s struggles. Without an accurate depiction of the root of your child’s struggles, treatment can be misguided and ineffective. A comprehensive Psychoeducational assessment aims to make sense of the difficulties your child is experiencing; it provides clarity around the reasons behind the challenges, so as to better treat the root of the issues as opposed to only the symptoms being expressed. You will gain perspective on what the world looks like through the eyes of your child, understand your child’s strengths, and learn how to compensate for their weaknesses. Your child will be seen in a new light. The practical tools, strategies, and recommended accommodations provided will increase the chances of success exponentially. Schools recommend a re-assessment approximately every two to three years.
Referring concerns/areas of investigation often include:
- Intellectual Functioning and Learning Style: Analysis of cognitive strengths and weaknesses including verbal skills, perceptual-reasoning skills, working memory, and the speed with which routine or newly taught information is processed. This promotes an understanding of which situations will work best, both for learning and demonstrating knowledge.
- Current Levels of Academic Achievement: Objective measures of fundamental skills related to reading, written language, and mathematic achievement. We also investigate fine-motor control, receptive and expressive vocabulary levels, and school motivation issues.
- Focus and Concentration: Objectively measure the ability to sustain attention for more monotonous tasks, as well as the ability to filter out environmental distractions and competing thoughts. Examine the ability to follow through on life’s daily chores and routines, self-organize, self-initiate, and self-monitoring/self-awareness skills.
- Restlessness and Impulsivity: Observe in a naturalistic setting one’s ability to remain seated without fidgeting, inhibit impulsive behaviours (e.g., shouting out answers, interrupting, respecting personal space), delay instant gratification, and wait one’s turn.
- Social Development: Investigate (through both naturalistic observation and standardized measures) the ability to make and keep friends, take others’ perspective, and understand subtle social cues (e.g., body language, facial expression, tone of voice, awareness of personal space).
- Emotional Regulation: Rely on specific standardized interviews to assess self-esteem, mood fluctuations, ability to recover from setbacks, and ways of perceiving the world.
- Anxiety: Identify the impact of anxiety on performance, separation anxiety, issues moderating/coping with stress, and neurological tendencies to obsess.
- Neuropsychological Development: Examines core neurological functioning in areas such as executive functioning, more complex language development, visuospatial processing, sensorimotor development, social perception, and retrieval abilities from short and long-term memory.
Our clinicians are experts at identifying Giftedness as well as childhood clinical disorders including Learning Disabilities, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and Anxiety and Mood Disorders. Our office is recognized for expertise in early detection of Autism Spectrum Disorders (e.g., Autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified).