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Psychologists, psychometrists and psychological associates may complete psychological assessments. All such assessments must be completed or supervised by a member of the College of Psychologists of Ontario. Typically, following your consent, we will meet in order to discuss your concerns with your child. Following our meeting, we will let you know what kind of testing would be called for. Typically, the assessment battery includes measure(s) of intellectual functioning, academic achievement and rating scales. It may also include other measures of cognitive processing. Other tests/tasks may be added to the assessment battery depending on your child's individual needs. These will be discussed with you when you attend for your interview for the psychological assessment.
If your child is being assessed for socio-emotional difficulties, he/she is likely to complete rating scales that help to identify many symptoms of emotional disorders in children as well as personality testing. Personality testing comprises of projective and objective measures. Projective measures include having your child draw pictures, complete open-ended sentences, describe ink blots and/or make up stories to go with picture cards. Projective tasks give the examiner the opportunity to gain some insight into your child's emotional world. On the other hand, objective tasks are paper and pencil tasks where your child responds to a series of questions in a true/false manner. These tasks are more factual and rely heavily on your child's level of openness and self-awareness. Socio-emotional evaluations may be used in conjunction with other evaluations in order to determine what factors may be contributing to your child's socio-emotional functioning.
Psychological testing with your child will usually take between 3-6 hours and is completed in a quiet room in a one-to-one format. Tasks completed by your child are usually considered enjoyable.
The results obtained will vary across children and youth depending on their individual circumstances. There is no way to predict at the outset what the test results will yield or how helpful they will be as this depends on numerous factors including the nature of the problem being assessed, test results, and the response of others (i.e., school, parents) to the findings, etc.
