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Educational Psychological Assessment Hannes Wessels

As a parent, you work very hard to provide your child with opportunities for them to succeed. Sometimes your child’s school performance might not be going as planned. This leaves many parents in a state of worry, frustration and uncertainty. This is where an educational psychological assessment can help. 

The stress about your child’s progress at school can cause unnecessary pressure. It can even cause a breakdown in the relationship with your child. This often makes the whole family feel helpless, frustrated, a little lost. Some parents even (unnecessarily) feel that they might have done something wrong.

There are so many factors that can influence your child’s learning. For instance this can include:

If not investigated, it can lead to unnecessary conflict, self-blame and frustration.

As an educational psychologist, I am passionate and driven to help people live up to their full potential and designing the lives that they want. Thus, I regularly use educational psychological assessments to help my clients and families figure out what are the obstacles to their success.

What is an educational psychological assessment?

An educational psychological assessment is a formal assessment process that measures skills related to a person or a child’s educational and psychological areas of functioning. 

During an assessment, I use a variety of formal (standardised) and informal (qualitative) tools to answer the questions my clients might have about their child’s functioning. 

More specifically part of this global assessment process is to measure a client’s domains of functioning. In other words, I try to find any factors that might influence a person’s scholastic progress. 

I don’t just measure the educational and psychological domains but rather anything that might impact it. Like your child’s emotions and social realities.

As part of the testing process, I aim to gather as much information as possible. For this reason, I ask a child’s teacher(s) and parents to complete forms related to a child’s developmental background, behaviours and academic progress.

The educational psychological assessments itself occurs typically over two days and takes about 5 hours. 

It is essential for me to establish a good working relationship with my clients before the assessment process starts. Normally, the first few minutes of the assessment is used to build rapport and to make sure the person being assessed is comfortable.

What will the results of an educational psychological assessment provide?

After the assessment process, you are provided with a psycho-educational assessment report. Some schools call it a global assessment report or an Edu-psych report.
 
The assessment report provides an understandable and logical analysis of the measured skills to answer the questions for the report. 
 
Together with the analysis of all the measured skillsets, interventions are recommended. The purpose of these recommendations is there to help improve the difficulties identified through the assessment process.
 
Another aim of the educational psychological report is to provide more an understanding of the challenges your child is facing. 
 
The report will also offer suggestions that can be implemented at home and at school. 
 
If your child is consulting with other professionals like a speech therapist or occupational therapist, it can also help guide their current therapy interventions.
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If you feel that your child might benefit from an educational psychological assessment contact me to book the appointments or call me if you would like to find out more.