Blog | A+ Solutions

Psycho-Educational Testing: What Parents Need To Know

Has your child’s teacher suggested that your son or daughter is not focusing, disruptive in class or exhibiting other behavioral issues?

Does your child have trouble with reading, math or writing?

Is he or she making excuses not to go to school?

Is your child socially awkward? The energizer bunny? A daydreamer?

According to School Psychologist, Courtney Evenchik, if you are experiencing any of the above and it has continued for several months, it might be wise to take your child for a psycho-educational evaluation.

What is Psycho-Educational Testing?

Psycho-educational testing refers to the psychological tests used to analyze the mental processes underlying your child’s educational performance. The goal of psycho-educational testing is to understand a child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses to determine academic interventions and/or support that might be needed.

What should I expect?

Psycho-educational testing can be an in-depth process. Parents are interviewed concerning their child’s medical and developmental history, academic as well as social emotional concerns. They are encouraged to bring any previous reports and report cards. Parents should also take the time to make a list of questions and concerns that they may have.

How long will it take?

Psycho-educational testing is a process that usually happens over several sessions. The total time is approximately 3 hours and is broken up into 1-hour sessions.The psychologist is also available for classroom observation and can talk to the child’s teachers.

What are some possible tests that are given?

IQ test: tests your child’s intellectual ability level

Achievement Tests: will measure your child’s skills and knowledge learned in a given grade level

Test of Attention and Vigilance: will measure your child’s attention to task, impulsivity, focus and vigilance

Phonological Processing Test: test your child’s ability to recognize sounds within words, the building blocks of reading

Measures of Reading Fluency: will measure your child’s ability to read fluently

Math Processing Test: will measure your child’s understanding of math concepts based on their grade level

Reading Comprehension: tests your child ability to understand what they are reading.

Visual/Motor Integration: tests your child’s eye/hand coordination which can contribute to writing difficulties

Once your child’s strengths and weaknesses are identified the school psychologist will help you come up with a plan for your child’s success. If there is a need a Speech and Language and/or Occupational therapy evaluation can be done.

If you have questions, our staff at A+ Solutions is ready to help!
Please call us at 216-896-0111.

Struggling Students: One Simple Way To Help Children Succeed At School

In our last post, The Science of Success: Help Children Succeed At School, we discussed how important it is to teach children Non-Cognitive Skills. Non-Cognitive Skills include:

Emotional Regulation
Perseverance
Conscientiousness
Optimism
Resilience
Curiosity

These Non-Cognitive Skills enable children to handle stress and manage strong emotions. More important, they may be a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

How can we help children develop these skills? In this week’s post we will discuss how we can help children develop the self-control needed for emotional regulation.

Dr. Oren Meyers of A+ Solutions, says that children can learn how to manage their feelings. Children will cry, scream, yell, and have tantrums often because their feelings are so overwhelming for them. The same can happen with adults. Children need to learn how to manage their feelings and express them in healthy ways.

Many therapists begin will use a feeling chart with children like the one pictured here to help clients begin the process of labeling their feelings:

Discussing feelings with a young client is a great way to expand children’s vocabulary and teach them the emotional language that they need to manage their feelings.

Here are examples of how you can discuss feelings with your child, helping them learn self-control:
Show a feelings chart to the child.
• Ask your child if they understand the words for the feelings on the chart.
• Work together to define the words.
• Ask if your child has experienced any of those feelings and when they occurred.
• Take turns discussing past events when you or your child had the feelings on the chart.
• It is best to start with positive events, for instance, someone complimented you at school and that made you feel happy and proud.
• Then you can discuss some negative events, for instance, how it felt when someone called you a name or said something insulting to you.
• Review often
• Younger children can be asked to imitate or draw faces to match the chart
• You can play Simon Says games to review the feelings portrayed by the pictures, for example: “Simon Says, look frustrated today.”

Bloomquist, M. (2013) Skills Training for Struggling Kids. Guilford Press. NY

The Science of Success: Help Children Succeed At School

There is much science and research on how to help children be successful in school. In order to help our kids, we need to build their educational muscles teaching them to be self-directed learners, helping them feel in control of their own learning.

Here is what you need to know as parents and educators:

1. Focus on the right things:
It is assumed that a child’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) score correlates with his ability to do well in school and become a successful adult. However, IQ only measures a child’s cognitive skills (logical ability, linguistic/verbal ability, visual spatial skills numerical skills and general intelligence). Research has shown that the focus on Cognitive skills is too narrow. In actuality, helping children develop Non-Cognitive skills is a better predictor of academic success.

2. What are Non-Cognitive Skills?:
According to Paul Tough, in his book, “How Children Succeed” Non-Cognitive Skills include Executive Function Skills, particularly Cognitive Flexibility, Working Memory and Emotional Regulation. Non-Cognitive Skills also include the character traits of perseverance, conscientiousness (self-control/emotional regulation), optimism, resilience and curiosity. These Non-Cognitve Skills are what children need in order to succeed at school, in the community, and in the workplace because they enable children to handle stress and manage strong emotions.

3. Can we teach this?
According to Tough, these Non-Cognitive Skills can be taught, even more so than IQ and can be improved well into adolescence and even adulthood.

4. What are the benefits?
The acquisition of these Non-Cognitive skills correlate with all manner of positive outcomes. Children who develop these traits are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and are more likely to maintain healthy social relationships. Blair and Raver (2014) in their report, “Closing the Achievment Gap” say, “Research has shown that executive functions, defined as cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control are malleable and predict academic achievement in children over and above IQ and socioeconomic status.”

5.Here’s the proof:

Tough, 2012, illustrates this point and the importance of teaching the charachter traits of perseverance, conscientiousness (self-control/emotional regulation), optimism, resilience and curiosity. He tells the story of Kipp Academy, a middle school in the South Bronx. The goal of Kipp Academy was to ensure that 75 percent of KIPP alumni would graduate from a four-year college, and 100 percent would be prepared for a stable career.

They looked like they were well on their way. In 1999, the first graduating class excelled on their achievement tests, scoring the highest in the Bronx and fifth-highest in all of New York City. May of them also won admission to highly selective private and Catholic schools, often with full scholarships.

However, the graduates fell short of the goals Kipp Academy had laid out for them. Tough reports, “Almost every member of the cohort did make it through high school, and more than 80 percent of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper, and every few weeks, another student dropped out…only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school graduated from a four-year college.”

The most important part of the story is this:

[It was found that] the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. Those skills weren’t enough on their own to earn students a B.A… But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, they seemed an indispensable part of making it to graduation day.”

In our next article, we will talk about ways to build children’s character and help them develop the Executive Function skills of Cognitive Flexibility, Working Memory and Emotional Regulation.

Does your child need an IEP?
Come and join us for a highly informative evening:

The ABCs of IEPs

Speaker: Courtney Evenchik, MA. NCSP
Director of School Psychology Services

Where: Residence Inn by Mariott Beachwood
3628 Park East Drive
Beachwood, Ohio 44122

Tuesday, November 15, 2016
7:30pm

Parents will learn:

What is an IEP?
Is my child eligible?
What types of interventions are available?
What is the referral process and how does it work?
What are your legal rights as parents?
Click here to sign up:
The ABCs of IEPs

References:
Blair C., Raver C. (2014) Closing the Achievement Gap through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten, PLOS One. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112393
Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiousity and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

Social Media and Youth: Raising Children In The Digital Era

A few weeks ago we had a great class with Amy Burzinski, LISW-S. The topic was:

Social Media and Youth: Raising Kids In The Digital Age

Thank you to Beachwood Recreation Center for hosting our class.

Amy has done extensive research on the subject of Social Media and how it affects our youth. She has surveyed both parents and students on the subject and shared with us the results of those surveys.

To start the class we were given a similar survey. Amy asked us to turn to our neighbor and discuss the following questions:

Should a parent know their son or daughter’s facebook password?
Should a teen be able to use his or her cell phone any time he or she wants?
When should parents set limits on a young person’s digital life?
Under what circumstances should parents monitor teens’ internet use and track the sites they visit?
If parents do monitor internet use, should they tell their teens they are doing this?
How much information should teens put on the internet? Why?

It was tough to answer these question and it was very interesting the different answers that came up. Amy addressed each one as she went through the class.

What do you think? What are your answers to the above questions?

Comment below!

Giving Choices: Promoting Independence In Our Children

Many of us have heard about how important it is to help children maintain their independence in this era of helicopter parenting.

One way that we can do that is to give children choices. Choices help kids feel that they have some control over their lives. We can offer choices to kids so they have some say in making simple everyday decisions and deciding household rules. Choices are good for children because it gives them lots of practice in making big and little decisions. It is also a parenting technique that is relatively easy to implement.

Giving children choices hands some control over to the child without compromising the adult’s authority — a win/win situation. Implicit in the choice is the fact that the child needs to fulfill the task, but gets to choose how it will be accomplished. Giving choices diffuses conflict and lets children assert their independence in a healthy way. It exercises their brains by making them think and solve problems. It is an extremely effective technique to use with independent, defiant children and toddlers.

We can start small by giving children choices about simple everyday decisions:

Would you like a pancakes or cereal for breakfast?
Do you want to make the sandwich for lunch or should I?
Which park should we go to? The big one or the little one?

We can then move on and have children get involved in making rules for the household:

When is a good time for you to take out the garbage?
Would you like to say excuse me or pardon me when you leave the dinner table?
How much time should we allot for electronics in our home?

Finally, we can give children choices to encourage decision making:

Do you think Aunt Sara would like a gift card to Amazon or her favorite department store?
Should we go to Washington DC or Niagra Falls for our vacation?
What’s the best way to go to your friend’s house? Which route should we take?

Teachers, tutors and therapists can also give children choices:

Task: Do you want to start with the Playdoh or the computer?
When: What do you want to do 1st and what do you want to do 2nd?
Where: Do you want to work on the desk or at the table?
Refusal: Do you want to stop now or keep on going?
Reward: Do you want a sticker or a prize from the prize box?
Materials: Do you want to use pencil or markers?

Kids like to have choices because it makes them feel in charge. When kids are offered choices they feel respected, valued and encouraged. Adults like giving children choices because they are still able to maintain their authority.

What choices do you give your children?

Want to learn more?
Contact us at A+ Solutions 216-896-0111