What are educational assessments?
Educational assessments are specialized psychological evaluations used to determine a child's academic and learning ability. A comprehensive educational assessment consists of both cognitive testing (measuring intellectual abilities) and achievement testing (measuring actual academic skills). Understanding how your child learns, processes information, and performs academically helps identify whether learning difficulties, giftedness, or specific learning disorders are present.
Achievement tests assess an individual's competency across key academic domains:
- Reading: reading fluency, comprehension, and accuracy
- Writing: spelling, handwriting, and composition skills
- Mathematics: mathematical knowledge and reasoning abilities
- Oral expression: listening comprehension and expressive language
The cognitive component measures intellectual functioning, processing speed, working memory, and problem-solving abilities. By comparing cognitive potential with actual academic achievement, psychologists can identify significant discrepancies that indicate learning disabilities or other factors affecting school performance.
Educational assessments provide objective, standardised data about your child's learning profile. This information is invaluable for making informed educational decisions, developing intervention strategies, and ensuring your child receives appropriate support at school.
Who Needs an Educational Assessment?
Educational assessments in Perth help identify learning challenges and guide educational planning for many students. Your child may benefit from an educational assessment if they:
- Experience unexplained academic struggles: Your child tries hard but consistently performs below expectations despite tutoring, extra help, or additional study time. There's a noticeable gap between their apparent intelligence and their academic results.
- Show inconsistent academic performance: They excel in some subjects but struggle significantly in others, or they perform well on some tasks but fail at seemingly similar ones. For example, they might have strong verbal skills but poor written expression, or understand math concepts verbally but struggle with calculations.
- Have been identified by teachers: Educators have expressed concerns about your child's learning, suggesting they're not reaching their potential or recommending assessment for learning support.
- Demonstrate specific difficulties: Clear patterns emerge, such as persistent reading struggles despite instruction, ongoing spelling and writing difficulties, math anxiety or calculation errors, or problems following multi-step instructions.
- Require documentation for support services: You're applying for NDIS funding, seeking special education services, requesting school accommodations, or need formal documentation for a learning support program.
- Are gifted or highly capable: Your bright child is underperforming, seems bored at school, or needs documentation for gifted and talented programs or acceleration.
- Experience attention or processing difficulties: Your child has trouble concentrating, processes information slowly, forgets instructions quickly, or has been diagnosed with ADHD, and you want to understand how this affects their learning.
- Are transitioning to senior school: You want a comprehensive learning profile before your child enters Years 11-12 to identify any support needs for WACE or to understand their academic strengths for subject selection.
- Have English as an additional language: You want to distinguish between language acquisition challenges and genuine learning difficulties to ensure appropriate support.
Many parents seek educational assessments when their instinct tells them something isn't quite right, even if they can't pinpoint exactly what. Trusting these parental concerns and seeking professional assessment often leads to earlier identification and better outcomes.
