Functional Assessment

If you have any concerns about your child’s speech, language or literacy development, it is important that an assessment of their current abilities is conducted.

 

Your speech pathologist may ask you to bring some information with you to the assessment such as:

 

• The client case history form

• Previous assessment reports

• School reports

• Work samples

 

There are different types of assessments for different ages and areas of concern. Young children may receive a relatively informal evaluation of their language under naturalistic conditions while older children may embark on a regime of reading, writing and spelling tests to determine their areas of difficulty.

 

In addition, some assessments may be conducted in order to determine the presence or absence of a condition such as Speech Disorder, Language delay or Specific Learning Disorder. Others may be conducted to enable your therapist to establish goals for therapy.

 

At intervals throughout therapy, review assessments are sometimes needed to determine progress and establish new goals for therapy.

 

We tend to divide assessments into two sessions; the first enables us to take a “broad brush” approach, and after analyzing the initial results, it provides us with the opportunity to “hone” in on specific areas that we want to investigate more thoroughly.

 

A detailed report will be written by your speech pathologist; this can be forwarded to your child’s teacher and other professionals.

 

The report will provide you with the results of the testing and discuss the implications for you child. It will also include recommendations for therapy if required.