Cognitive Assessment
General Cognitive Assessment
“A complete solution for your child or adolescent”
Intake & booking – may be done online or by telephone
Background screening – Online psychological questionnaires and forms.
Initial interview – Meet with a clinician or our team to plan for assessment and discuss goals.
Assessment – Identify the root cause of any cognitive, learning, social, emotional or behavioural issues. This may include technologically based screening
Feedback session – Go through the results, areas that need treating, and follow-up recommendations.
Parent Report – report outlining your child’s profile, any diagnoses, recommended follow-up, and strategies to manage weaknesses at home.
School advisory – Where relevant you will be provided a school advisory for additional support
Family / School team support – Where appropriate and desired, our clinicians are able to meet with family and/or school to provide a full spectrum of support and intervention strategies.
Intervention / Therapy program/s
A complete therapy plan to address all areas of need including: psychological therapy, cognitive training, or other learning or skills training.
General Costs for Assessment
To administer all available cognitive tests for young people and adolescents, would likely take over 9 hours. At Mental Health Spot P&P we tailor and assessment process unique to your child and your family situation. One way to do this is base an assessment on parent and teachers ratings and self-difficulties reported by the young person themselves.
Although IQ and ability tests are part of an assessment, they should not be considered “the assessment” as they may not identify the underlying issues that may need addressing. Additionally, evidence-based questionnaires are helpful but alone may entirely insufficient to measure many presentations – such as ADHD and Autistic Spectrum.
ADHD assessments for example may strongly benefit from the inclusion of brainwave scans. ADHD is a cognitive condition that is evidenced by differential brainwave activity. One way to ensure you are not misdiagnosing and medicating unnecessarily is to confirm any diagnoses with objective data (see qEEG).
Additionally, research demonstrates that 1:8 females with ASD (or “Aspergers”) are either misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all by teaching and health professionals. This is a scary thought for a cognitive style where awareness can lead to wonderful progressions in treatment and indeed life.
Assessments should include strategies for developing both strengths and weaknesses, over the short and long term. Interventions should work with people as human beings too. Feelings of self-doubt, anxiety and stress can impede any other more cognitively focused strategies, so at Mental Health Spot we work with parents, young people and their siblings to create an environment for success.
Examples of some of the assessment components we may use;
- qEEG brainwave activity
- Intellectual functioning: verbal reasoning, nonverbal reasoning, working memory, processing speed
- Reading accuracy, reading speed & reading comprehension
- Spelling & writing
- Phonological Awareness: blending, segmentation, rapid naming, phonological memory, non-word reading
- Mathematical operations and reasoning
- Memory: visual & verbal memory, immediate and delayed memory, recognition memory
- Attention: visual sustained attention, auditory sustained attention, switching attention, divided attention, selective attention
- Attention/ memory span: auditory & visual
- Impulsivity & stimulation (boredom) levels- to both auditory and visual information
- Executive functioning: planning, organisation, abstract reasoning, self-monitoring, utilising feedback
- Processing speed: visual and auditory
- Cognitive flexibility
- Visual processing: discrimination, figure-ground, spatial skills, closure, form constancy
- Auditory processing: discrimination, figure-ground, filtered hearing, ear dominance
- Psychological issues: depression, anxiety, anger/frustration, aggression, self-esteem
- Social skills