A psycho-educational assessment is conducted by a registered psychologist who has training in this particular type of assessment. The types of information gathered include:
Personal background information through interviews with parents, teachers and/or the individual. Examples of information gathered include birth and developmental history, education history, medical and health information, and family relationships.
Questionnaires that may look at the person’s behaviour, daily living skills, attention, mood, and social skills.
School records, which include report cards, teachers’ letters, and other assessments.
Sometimes observing the child in their classroom setting can be helpful for understanding their behaviour and learning challenges.
Standardized testing, which looks at things like a person’s intelligence, academic skills, memory, and language abilities. These are typically standardized, norm-referenced tests. Standardized means that when they created the test, they made very specific instructions that everyone giving the test must follow, and they gave it to lots of people who are a representative sample of the population. Norm-referenced means that they have statistical information that allows the psychology to compare your child’s performance with other students her age and/or grade.
Standard Scores:Â These are typically scores that give a number based on several smaller tasks. On these tests 100 is the middle score. Percentile Ranks are easier to understand though.
Percentile Rank: This score tells you how well you or your child performed compared with a person the same age or grade. These are numbers that range from less than one to just under 100, representing the  performance of 100 people who are the same age. If your score is at the 10th percentile, that means that you performed better than or equal 10 out of 100 other people the same age. If your child’s score is at the 75th percentile, that means that he performed better than or equal to 75 out of 100 children his age.
Referral Questions: What types of tests, questionnaires and observations will be done will depend on what you and the psychologist decide will be the primary focus of the assessment. This is often called the “referral question”. Referral questions help to give the assessment a purpose.
Common referral questions include:
- Why am I or my child struggling to learn to read?
- Why am I or my child struggling in all academic areas?-My teenager works very hard, but doesn’t seem to be getting grades that reflect this effort. Why?
- Do I or my child have a Learning Disability?
- What can help with my or my child’s learning?