Psychoeducational Assessment

What is a psychoeducational assessment?

A psychoeducational assessment is a comprehensive evaluation that provides insight into your child/adolescent’s unique strengths and challenges. It is ideal for children and youth looking to improve their school performance and address any learning issues they may be experiencing. While not all students will receive a diagnosis of Specific Learning Disorder (aka learning disability), the assessment is still helpful to document their unique pattern of strengths and challenges.

A psychoeducational assessment is often recommended for children/adolescents when:

They struggle in core academic areas of reading, writing, or math despite having received targeted interventions in these areas, and there is a suspicion of a Specific Learning Disorder
They are delayed in their development and an Intellectual Disability
is suspected
You want to get more information about how your child learns best and how to maximize their learning potential

How is an assessment helpful?

Psychoeducational assessments are important in that they can help you understand your child’s learning and behavioral profile. They help to identify the way that your child learns best and can act as a “roadmap” to ensure that your child learns and develops to their full potential. Knowing which natural strengths your child has is important to improving their happiness and quality of life in future. Other benefits of psychoeducational assessments is they can identify what strategies and tools will maximize their learning, and can help your child advocate for their needs. Such assessments can also help to identify if there are any Specific Learning Disorders in academic areas such as reading, writing, and math and what specific supports may be beneficial. The earlier a child receives a psychoeducational assessment the earlier insights can be gained about your child’s learning style to help ensure they reach their full potential.

What does the assessment involve?

A psychoeducational assessment typically involves a thorough interview with parents and teacher (if available), review of academic records, and completion of questionnaires. We also do comprehensive objective testing of various cognitive domains. The assessment involves both direct services (interviews with parents and/or teachers, testing, feedback) and indirect services (scoring, report writing, reviewing records). The number of hours needed for each child can vary based on their work pace, but in general comprehensive psychoeducational assessments take about 15 hours at $250/hour (i.e., around $3750). Occasionally a child may need additional hours of testing. We prefer to do the assessment over one full day as we feel that this is most representative of a child’s typical school day.

Next Steps

Visit our Contact Page and complete the contact form and we will schedule a brief phone call to gather some more information and answer any questions. We will provide a quote and timeline for scheduling an assessment.