Assessment
Evaluations We Offer
- Autism evaluations
- ADHD evaluations
- Developmental evaluations (ages 2+)
- Child Diagnostic evaluations
- IQ evaluations
- Learning Disability evaluations
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens during an evaluation?
This depends on the age of the child and your concerns, but overall we spend a lot of time going over different activities like testing verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning skills. We may test development by asking kids to complete tasks in multiple areas of development and compare their capacity to other children their age. Development assessments often include scales for communication, motor skills, social skills, adaptive skills and cognition. For older kids, we sometimes test more complex abilities to remember, to pay attention, to think about others, etc. When we test for autism, we engage children in activities that are designed to pull out their social communication skills.
How do I explain to my child why they need to get evaluated without making it seem like something is “wrong”?
Handout from Understood.org
Why would I want to pursue a psychological evaluation for my child?
Families pursue evaluations for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes their child is having difficulty with something and it’s hard to pin down where the difficulty lies. For example, a child’s grades might be dropping, but this could be due to difficulties in attention, difficulties understanding the content, difficulties understanding the instructions, or a million other reasons. Sometimes kids have difficulty paying attention when someone is talking, and adults see this behavior because the child forgets instructions for a task. Kids can forget instructions because they weren’t paying attention in the first place, because something distracted them, because they have difficulties hearing, because they listened initially but forgot before starting the task, and many other reasons. Testing allows us to discern what may be driving these difficulties so we can support your child to be successful in a multitude of settings.
Why should we “label” my child?
This is SUCH a good question. Overall, the system of diagnosing and pigeonholing kids into a cookie cutter format is not helpful for intervention or for your child’s view of themselves. We prefer to test so we can understand the way a child’s unique brain works, because then we can adapt our way of interacting, teaching, and communicating to fit their needs rather than trying to force them to fit ours. However, we can’t do this effectively for many children until we understand them. The testing is simply a way to understand them more thoroughly. You will find that when we summarize our results we describe a pattern of strengths and weaknesses rather than simply a deficit model.
How much are parents involved in the evaluation?
For liability reasons, parents are required to be present on the premises for the duration of the evaluation. However, for kids later-elementary aged they are not actively involved in the evaluation itself. For younger kids, parents are involved during select portions of the evaluation, and this will be clearly communicated when you arrive.
What should we bring to the evaluation?
We recommend checking in with the person who calls to schedule and confirm your evaluation, but common things we recommend are:
- Sweatshirt for your child – just in case the testing environment is too cold
- Water bottle – we test for a while and it can be tiring
- Snacks and lunch – if testing goes longer than three hours we will take a break for lunch
Billing & Insurance
I am in network with the following insurances:
- BCBS
- United Healthcare
- Cigna
- Aetna
Please contact our office for out of network pricing for testing.