Learning assessments help to ease the frustrations or concerns parents may have about their child’s academic performance.
And importantly, learning assessments can help your child to achieve their full potential during their school years.
By assessing the major areas that impact learning, our psychologists get a comprehensive insight into your child’s ability, potential, and any barriers stopping them from achieving it.
From there, the best approaches and solutions can be put in place to help a child thrive school.
In our first post of this series, we delved into one of the key tools for assessing learning potential — the WISC-V assessment.
In this post, we’ll give you a run down of one of our other core assessment tools — the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test — and how it can help your child.
Importantly — unlike many schools that conduct these learning assessments — our psychologists always like to do the WISC and WIAT together.
Doing only one assessment only gives a part of the picture.
‘It’s like looking at the motor without fixing the performance in a car’, explains our senior psychologist Deborah Jepsen.
The WISC-V produces a full-scale IQ test that represents your child’s general intellectual ability.
The WIAT complements these findings by going further…
It assesses the academic achievement of your child, either on a broad range of skills, or, when appropriate, on a specific area of need.
Tested together, they provide a great insight into your child’s progress and potential…
And help to recommend the best approach to their education.
There are four basic scales in the test in the WIAT — Reading, Maths, Writing and Oral Language.
The Reading Section assesses word-reading ability, such as pre-reading and decoding skills; their reading comprehension skills; and their phonetic skills (speech sounds).
The Maths section assesses number operations (like counting and solving computations) and maths reasoning (like solving verbal maths-based problems).
The Written Language section assesses spelling and written expression.
And the Oral Language section assesses listening comprehension and oral expression.
The WIAT test is incredibly useful for identifying academic strengths and weaknesses, and in planning intervention and solutions to any problem areas.
The test can be used in a number of settings, including in schools…
But it’s best performed by a psychologist.
Why?
Because they can interpret the results much more meaningfully within the context of the child’s background, personality, current emotional functioning, and attention and motivation levels.
When our psychologists think they need more information, the WIAT-III offers 16 subtests that can be used to assess individual areas of concern.
For example, if your child is showing borderline problematic issues with maths…
A further subtest can be conducted, such as a math fluency test.
The updated WIAT-III also features more in-depth subtests, and an advanced scoring system that has been informed by studies and expert researchers, which enable our psychologists to give you the best and most productive intervention options ASAP.
These interventions may start with another assessment, like Connors for ADHD diagnosis, or the NEPSY.
If you have any concerns over your child’s performance at school…
OR want to help them to reach their full potential…
The WIAT-III test is designed to help you help them.
Further Reading
NEPSY: Assessments for improving your child’s learning potential — Part 3