Procedure for Child Diagnostic Assessment
Before the Office Appointment:
- You will be provided with a Consent Form to review, complete, sign and send into the office by post or email.
- Prior to meeting you or your child, we will be requesting some specific information from yourself and the school/preschool, and reviewing all documents you organize for submission to us. This helps to determine the specific components of the assessment.
- The lead Psychologist will organise the office part of the assessment date with you directly via email.
The day of the office assessment:
- You will come to the office with your child to meet with the Psychologist/s.
- The appointment will consist of a full psych-educational assessment. Relevant assessment tools guide the process.
- The beginning of the session is casual, allowing time for your child to get comfortable.
- The Psychologist will review the purpose of the day and what will happen in the session.
- During the office visit, which will be approximately 3 hours, Educational and academic assessments are undertaken. You will remain to participate in a full discussion so that diagnostic queries can be explored. As far as possible, parents will be asked to leave your child with the psychologist and will be given a timeframe to return. You will, at the close, be given our impressions and some initial recommendations though test scores (I.Q., academic, etc.) won’t be available that day. It’s not unusual to have the child return to complete the testing.
After the office session(s):
- A formal written report is produced which analyses the test results to identify the child’s learning pattern; strengths and weaknesses. We also include relevant individualized recommendations. We spend considerable time on this as it represents your child so we want it to be as accurate and useful as possible.
- An office or zoom session to provide feedback and discuss assessment outcome is arranged on request. The report will then be sent to you in pdf format for you to review for accuracy and once you provide any necessary feedback, it will be finalised for you to distribute as needed. On request, the clinical report can be modified for submission to the school, i.e. an alternative copy with sensitive family information excluded.