For those of you who work with children with special needs, either as an allied health professional, a teacher, or a staff of the learning support program in your school, this post is for you.. If you are a parent of a child with special needs, this post about Psychoeducational Evaluation Reports is also for you.
For starters, you simply ask, what is
psychoeducational testing or evaluation?
It is a procedure or a process done by professionals with students (learners, children etc) meant to estimate a child's actual skill levels. Remember:
"Psychoeducational testing is conducted on an individual basis. Since the examiner, in a controlled testing situation, is able to monitor the examinee’s level of effort, individually-administered tests provide more valid estimates of the individual’s skills as compared to group-administered tests. Often, a child’s performances will be better in an individual testing situation than his/her performances in the classroom.
With this in mind, it is important to remember that the purpose of individualized testing is to provide the most valid estimates of the child’s actual skill levels. In an uncontrolled environment, such as the classroom, many extraneous factors (e.g., visual and auditory distractions) can prevent a child from performing optimally."
In the Philippines, psychoeducational evaluation has become synonymous with the name Edilberto Dizon, Ph. D. of the Special Education Area of the College of Education of the University of the Philippines in Diliman. I am always thrilled whenever I receive a student's diagnostic reports made by the man, Sir Dizon.
If you read my post three months ago,
Special Education Process: The Philippine Experience, the child or student will have to go through psychoeducational testing before the individualized educational plan is written. This report must be distributed among the members of the Rehab Team.
For further reading, I would like you to check out the links below:
Other professionals like Developmental Pediatricians will also provide you a diagnostic report but they have never been so in tune with what the educators need to know about their students.Parents have complained too that some of these medical doctors tend to over generalize their diagnosis, in fact the so-called waste-basket diagnosis like Autism and Learning Disability have been used like for forever. The reports they usually send out factors in on the developmental levels of their clients, ignoring the fact that these reports will be used substantially in the academe.
All these issues are hopefully addressed in
Act to Recruit, Hire, and Train Additional School-based Guidance Counselors, Psychologists, School Social Workers and Mental Health Personnel, sponsored by former First Lady and Senator Dr. Loi Estrada in 2004.
