Psychological Assessment
School psychologists complete assessments with individual students as part of a screening process or as part of the Committee on Special Education (CSE) process.
Screenings are usually conducted as part of the Response to Intervention (RTI) process, e.g. if Tier 2 interventions have not been sufficient for a student, a screening is done to gather more information about a student’s strengths and weaknesses in order to guide Tier 3 interventions. To learn more about the RTI process, click on the link listed under "Additional Links. " A screening is not a full evaluation.
Full psycho-educational evaluations are completed as part of the Committee on Special Education (CSE) process. Students are referred to CSE as part of the Response to Intervention process if Tier 3 interventions indicate that special education services may be needed. Parents may also refer students to CSE.
The psycho-educational evaluation is one part of a CSE evaluation. The other components are a Social History, Teacher Report, Classroom Observation and Physical Examination.
The psycho-educational evaluation can assess different areas of development, depending on the referral concern. Different areas that can be assessed in a psycho-educational evaluation include:
Cognitive functioning - This refers to the set of abilities commonly referred to as intelligence. Specific abilities include verbal comprehension, reasoning, auditory/visual processing, processing speed and memory. Your school psychologist may choose from a number of different instruments to measure these abilities as they relate to the referral concern.
Adaptive functioning - Adaptive skills are those practical, everyday skills required to function and meet environmental demands, including effectively and independently taking care of oneself and interacting with other people. Usually this area is assessed through checklists that are filled out by a student’s parent and/or teacher.
Social-Emotional functioning - The core features of social-emotional development include the ability to identify and understand one's own feelings, to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others, to manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner, to regulate one's own behavior, to develop empathy for others, and to establish and maintain relationships. Social-emotional functioning is usually assessed through checklists that are filled out by a student's parent and/or teacher.
Achievement - An achievement test is designed to measure acquired skills or knowledge in a specific subject area. The areas of achievement assessed may include reading, mathematics, written language, and oral language. Achievement tests provide an analysis of a student's academic strengths and weaknesses within each achievement domain assessed, and a comparison of the student's achievement to the performance of a national norm group.
A functional behavior assessment is another type of evaluation that may be completed by a school psychologists. To learn more, click on the link below.
Functional Behavior Assessment