Who might you go to if you wanted to have your children evaluated for behavioural or intellectual capacities?

Sometimes this is needed if parents are attempting to place a child in a school or even to assess behaviour that school officials have been observing. Sometimes a parent knows there is something “wrong”, but doesn’t know what, and sometimes the family doctor suspects a diagnosis but wants a confirming consultation.

One of the main specialties of a psychologist is often psychological testing and evaluation that helps make a more specific and well-defined diagnosis, establishes the cognitive, intellectual, and adaptive strengths and weaknesses of an individual, or contributes to the establishment of strategies in an individual educational plan for school officials. Recently, more comprehensive evaluations have also included neuropsychological instruments in order to provide a better understanding of the capacities to learn or to organise oneself in various contexts of living.

There are basically two approaches to evaluating anyone this way.

The first method is to ask them questions and compare how they answer those questions with a large pool of people who have established clinical diagnoses or cognitive deficits.

This is the approach of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2).

It provides a profile of the person and sees how closely they match people with established psychological disorders. This approach relies on a person’s ability to report on him or herself, to respond accurately and faithfully, without attempting to look better than they are, or worse than they are, and to respond diligently, without giving up and just answering everything in some kind of haphazard manner.

The test can actually detect such response patterns, and if it does, it indicates than an “invalid” profile has been presented. In such cases the psychologist cannot use any of the data generated by taking the test.

The second method is to observe the person in action in some way and then to report on that. This is the approach of such projective instruments as the classic inkblot test (in which a person looks at a nebulous “ink blot” and describes what he or she sees in it, what it looks like to them). Another form of performance-based evaluation is the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, fourth edition (WISC-IV).

It is a well-respected test for intelligence and cognitive ability that presents a child with various tasks such as arranging blocks in various patterns, identifying what is missing from pictures, recalling numbers and letters, and other such tasks.

The subject in such tests is asked to do something, and their performance is timed or otherwise assessed in comparison with a large pool of people. The result is that the performance demands represent various cognitive and intellectual capacities and the subject’s performance places them somewhere in a normal range between very low to very high.

My preference, when assessing the capabilities of people, is for the performance-based evaluation.

I am with the person as they are going through it (as opposed to them sitting by themselves filling out true-false questions), and I can get a personal feel for the way they respond to various demands as well as then later compare their results to the norm group.

Recently, the abilities of a person to pay attention, organise, self-regulate, engage in creative problem solving, inhibit impulses, switch from one thing to another and such have gained interest among psychologists and educators because they relate to so many human experiences.

These are called the executive functions.

The neuropsychological assessment of executive functions can, for instance, show how a person does ADHD, not merely that they do it.

There are two main ways to assess the executive functions. The BRIEF is a self-report questionnaire that depends on the ability of people to accurately state what their experiences have been in life.

It corresponds to the first method in assessments. Its advantage is that it is fairly quick and inexpensive, but its disadvantage is that it relies on self-report. Two other instruments have been used to establish a performance-based evaluation of executive functions: The NEPSY (a developmental neuropsychological battery for children) and the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS). These are much more complex, take a little more time and effort, but they provide much more reliable and useful results.

When people are considering what kinds of assessments they might want to undergo in connection with having their children evaluated, it makes sense to question the psychologist conducting them to make sure one is getting something truly useful.

This is all part of the client being knowledgeable and empowered with reference to his or her own mental health care.