Three questions to ask before your child has an educational assessment.

First. let us define what we mean by an educational assessment.

The dictionary says that an assessment is a measure of the size or quality of something. So, an educational assessment is a measure of the quality (or amount) of a someone’s educational ability.

It is a measure of what someone knows or can do.

So far so good. We can all agree that information about the amount of knowledge or skill that a person possesses is a good thing. But it is only a good thing if two things happen.

First, the assessment has to have validity.
Now I know that, in the field of assessment, the word ‘validity’ has a special meaning. But I want you to think of the word ‘validity’ as meaning ‘being of value’, something of worth, something useful. What is the point of putting your child, and yourself, through an assessment process if the results are not useful in some way?

Secondly, the assessment process has to lead to some type of action.
Why assess a child unless you want to know what you can do to help him or her become a better learner? An educational assessment should tell you what support your child needs and how that support will be provided.

As a learning assistance teacher I worked with many children who had been assessed by educational psychologists because there was concern over their learning. I am not a registered psychologist, but I do understand what most of the assessment tools measure and can usually interpret the results. Some assessments were very useful, others less so.

The useful assessments helped me decide the best way to help the child learn, they pointed to practical ways I could support a child’s education. The results were translated in a way that allowed me to adapt the recommendations to fit in with school work.

The less useful ones were those that seemed to take no account of the practicalities of school life. They might suggest that a child need special coaching or placement in a special class or school. All I, or anybody in the school, could do was to put the child on a wait list and do the best we could until this extra support was available. This became very frustrating, and at one stage we were even told that we could not give children a certain diagnosis because there was no way the school system could support those type of children.

As a teacher I had put a lot of faith in these assessments. They were the key to getting the children the specialized help they needed. But I soon learned that the assessments were not really done for the child’s sake, or to help the child’s family or teachers provide support, the assessments were done for the school system. They helped the school system organize special classes, restrict entrance and share out precious resources. And this is what they had to do, this is what was needed for a school system to go some way to providing extra support for children with learning needs.

So, if these assessments were mainly for the school system, where did that leave the teachers and parents who were struggling to find ways to help a child handle learning difficulties? It left them confused, frustrated, and upset. It left them without the information and advice they needed to help the child succeed. I know because I often had to handle the fall-out from such assessments. I could usually interpret and adapt the recommendations to what I was doing in the classroom, but parents without my background in education were often at a loss about what an assessment meant and what they could do to support their child’s learning.

I found myself acting as an interpreter. I would read a report and try to explain the results to the confused parent. I would then take the report’s recommendations and translate them into things the parents could do to help their child. In this way I tried to make the assessment results useful for parents who wanted to support their child’s learning.

So, before you get your child’s learning assessed you need to ask yourself the following questions:

– Who is this assessment really for? My child, me, the teacher, the school system?

— What is this assessment going to tell me that I don’t already know?

— How will I be able to use the results to benefit my child?

If you don’t like the answers keep asking more questions until you do.