What is an Educational Evaluation?
An educational evaluation is conducted in order to provide information to help parents better understand their child’s personal style of learning and the skills they have mastered or continue to struggle with in school. This assessment typically focuses on a child’s reading, mathematics, and writing abilities. This type of evaluation often helps to identify specific learning disabilities, subtle academic weaknesses, or gaps in academic skills. An educational evaluation is often, although not always, conducted in the context of a neuropsychological evaluation. When conducted in the context of a neuropsychological evaluation, one can appreciate not only fundamental learning disabilities but how a child’s neurocognitive strengths and weaknesses specifically impact reading, writing, and mathematics skills, and vice versa.
An educational evaluation provides a detailed picture of a child’s overall potential and specific areas of difficulty and is particularly useful for parents making decisions about school placement, school readiness, and the need for additional educational services and accommodations outside of school. Importantly, an educational evaluation will bolster the need for an IEP or 504 Plan, and will support implementation of school accommodations and modifications, as well as placement decisions.
Evaluations are also available for students of all levels seeking accommodations on standardized tests (e.g. SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, Bar Exam, and Medical Boards) to determine if qualifications are met.
What are Related Educational Services?
Related educational services refer to the examination of all school-related records, including, but not limited to, teacher questionnaires, previous school-based evaluations, and past/current IEP’s and 504 Plans. Additionally, this service refers to the development of an academic plan and specific recommendations to support your child’s learning.
A pediatric ADHD evaluation can help you understand why a child might be demonstrating difficulties with focusing and attending and/or with hyperactivity and impulse control. An ADHD evaluation will also help you understand a child’s overall strengths and weaknesses as well as processing skills. The evaluation will help you determine whether there is a diagnosis of ADHD, whether the symptoms are due to other challenges, and whether a child may qualify for school-based accommodations as a result of his/her difficulties.
Executive functions are the cognitive processes that allow one to efficiently and effectively manage resources. Many skills fall within this domain – processing, attention, organization, and working memory. Individuals with ADHD, by definition, struggle with aspects of executive functioning. However, executive functioning challenges are also observed in other disorders. Our evaluations will help you tease apart whether executive functioning challenges contribute to your child’s difficulties and what can be done to best support them.
