Yesterday I heard the Chairperson of my local School Board talk about how upcoming financial cuts will change the services they offer. This is never good news, but something else she said almost was even more worrying.
Parents who are concerned about their child’s education and want to know what can be done to help their child learn are unable to get a learning assessment for their child without a long wait. Sometimes parents can wait years until their child reaches the top of the list for an educational assessment. By then it can be too late. Their child will have missed so many learning opportunities that it will be very hard for him or her to catch up.
Parents understand this and want to do something about it, so they have their child’s learning assessed privately. The schools here have to act on these assessments so may parents see this as a way of jumping the queue.
And who can blame them? Parents want the best for their child, and if the system cannot help them then they will try and get what they need privately.
But not all assessments are created equal. Before you get an assessment of your child’s learning you need to ask yourself what you want the assessment to do.
Do you want to use an assessment to try and get the school to provide extra services for your child? Then you must make sure that the person doing the assessing has qualifications that are recognized by the school system. And you should find out what type of learning issues are accepted as making a child in need of extra support. These are made very clear by school boards and are used as a means of allocating scare resources such as special education assistant or special school placement. If your child does not come into any of the categories that are recognized by the school board then he or she will automatically be ineligible for extra support and you will have wasted your money.
Do you want a learning assessment to find about your child’s level of achievement in relation to other children of the same age? You might think that your child is exceptionally bright or that he or she is not doing well in some subjects and you want to know how your child’s learning compares to that of other children. A learning assessment can tell you this. Most learning assessment results are based on some set of standardized testing. That means that the results are always presented in ways that compare what your child can do with what the vast majority of other children of the same age are expected to be able to do. There is a standard that your child is measured against.
I have two concerns about this type of assessment. Firstly, I am not sure what good it does to know what your child can do in comparison to others. How is this going to help you understand what support your child needs? Secondly, most of these reports are written in a style of language that is very difficult to understand. Even I, with some knowledge of the language of assessment , have difficulty understanding what the report is saying and i know that parents have even more difficulty. I have worked with several parents helping them understand the results of their child’s learning assessment and trying to translate the results into practical ways they can support their child’s learning.
Do you want a learning assessment to find out why your child is struggling to learn? Then you need to find an assessment that looks specifically at how your child learns rather than what they know or can do.
The results you will get from this type of assessment may not tell you how bright your child is in comparison to other children – but you now that already don’t you!- it will not give you the raw data that will tell a school system that your child needs special school support – but if your child needs this type of support you are probably already aware of the depth of his or her learning issues!
It will tell you why your child is having learning problems and it will tell you what you need to do to help your child overcome those problems. In short, it will give you back the power you need to help your child learn.
This type of assessment is hard to find. I know, I have been conducting these assessments for years.
If this is the kind of learning assessment you want for your child contact me. I have now got a full range of services that will help you discover why your child is struggling to learn and exactly what you can do to help. It has taken me a while to adapt my one-on-one assessment process into something that all parents can use. But it is ready now – check out my site for more information, and start giving your child the learning opportunities he or she needs to become an eager, happy learner once again.
