Main Body

8 Evaluating devepmental level

Learning Objectives

  • Identify the importance of evaluating developmental level.

All psycho-educational assessments must address diagnostic questions such as whether or not a child has an Intellectual Disability or a Specific Learning Disorder. These diagnostic evaluations are also important for children with multiple, severe disabilities. An additional essential component of the evaluation should be to provide an estimate of the child’s level of developmental functioning in various areas. Estimating a child’s developmental level involves synthesizing results of direct testing, observation, parent report, teacher report, and adaptive functioning measures. All of these things must be considered in the context of typical and atypical development. Having a firm grasp on early child development is essential. In particular, understanding typical development between birth and age 3 is important. You need to further understand the impact of sensory and motor impairments on development. According to Piaget’s theory of development, learning begins with the acquisition of sensory input (sensori-motor stage).  Children with motor and sensory impairments may experience limited sensory input, limited ability to explore their environment, reduced opportunities for incidental learning, and reduced experiential learning. Furthermore, physical needs (e.g., toileting, dressing) may take up a relatively large part of their day, leaving less time in the day for typical learning/developmental experiences. In addition, you may see aspects of learned helplessness, for example as parents learn to anticipate child’s needs without the child making requests.

 

Identifying a child’s developmental level will help you to provide recommendations to tailor a child’s educational programming to their developmental functioning. Understanding a child’s current level of functioning is also important to help identify the next steps in development and what is needed to get there.

9 year old Shary was able to scribble randomly on the page using a fisted grip. This suggests that Shary’s next goal should be to work on coloring in the lines of drawings, followed by drawing simple shapes such as lines and circles. Once she is drawing some controlled, meaningful shapes, then it would be time to work on letter writing. Her school was having her practice hand over hand writing of her name multiple times per day which was not helping her progress towards independent writing.
10 year old Phillip’s school team is helping him understand and predict his daily activities by using a visual schedule. The schedule uses “clip art” (line drawings) of various activities, as Phillip does not recognize letters or words. In your assessment, you identify that Phillip’s overall developmental level is in the range of 9-15 months. He does not yet have symbolic understanding that pictures represent actions or objects, which is not unexpected given his developmental level. He is able to identify familiar objects (e.g., “where is the spoon?). Based on this, you recommend that Phillip’s team consider using actual physical objects to symbolize activities (e.g., basketball for gym, drum for music).

When a child scores low on standardized tests, it tells us about what they cannot do, not what they can do. As part of the assessment,  make sure to look for what the child is capable of doing. Incorporating non-standardized adaptive assessment can be helpful to quickly evaluate a specific skill. For example, when using this approach, start where you think the child is, and adapt the difficulty level of the skills you are assessing up or down based on the child’s responses. This will get you to the child’s developmental level quickly.

12 year old Joey is not able to answer any simple math problems (e.g., 1+2), orally or on paper. You offer him a set of 5 blocks and ask him to count how many blocks are present. He is able to count the objects with 1:1 correspondence by moving the blocks as he counts them. He cannot, however, reliably count objects printed on a page as he loses count of which ones he has counted. When he has counted the blocks, you give him 5 more and ask him to tell you “how many blocks are there if you add 2 blocks to your 5 blocks?” Joey is able to add 2 blocks, and count the total of 7. You now know that Joey understands basic numeracy and can count real objects up to at least 7. He needs manipulatives to be successful.

Key Takeaways

  • It is important to have a firm grasp on typical development, particularly for the birth to 3 age range.
  • Identifying a child’s developmental level can help you make specific recommendations for interventions to help the child make developmental progress.

Resources for further information

 

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Beyond the WISC: Psychological assessment of cognitive functioning in special populations Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Engle, Ph.D., Registered Psychologist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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