Finally...testing is set up...questions???

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Well, after many months and trips of many miles to see various doctors, we finally have a testing day set...this Saturday! It was going to be later in the month, but they had a cancellation yesterday, so they gave us the appointment!

For those of you who have been through the testing, what can I expect? I have been told it will probably take about 3 hours and that they will test his focus, as well as language, pragmatics etc. What do you tell your child about the testing? I don't want him to get nervous and scared, which he does over tests at school.

Thanks for any advice. School starts on Monday and it will be great to be able to take a diagnosis to them the first week.

Laura

I am glad you finally have it set.

I don't know if I can tell you anything useful about the testing process, since my son's was done through the school as a "tentative" diagnosis that we've been happy to leave at that (we are lucky in that it has been enough, in our district, to get an IEP et al). He had an IQ test (disparate scores on the component functions are common) and talked with the district psychiatrist. He didn't find any of it overwhelming, although I've heard that some older children have found the formal diagnosis process quite invasive; it may vary by the style of who is doing it.

As for what to tell the child, I think that may depend on what he, himself, has already noticed. When my son started the assessment process at school (start of second grade) he was already quite aware that while he and those around him perceived him as very intelligent, he was unable to produce work product in a school setting. So I told him that the process was about figuring out why this issue existed, so that the teachers would know how to help him work around it.

Good job on setting up a test to ensure the best school experience for your child. With that said, there are numerous caveats involved. Some unscrupulous psychologists can skew the results by acting in ways that make a patient anxious (inadvertently or otherwise), which can skew the results. Spend a lot of time talking to the psychologists, and find out about how they will be doing the testing. Will they be writing stuff down in front of your son? Will they ask him question that are intended to trip him up? Will they give test results to both you and your son at the same time, or will they set up separate appointments? All these things are very important. I have a thread about a psychologist that sent me into a depression: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt103400.html. It's a bit of a rant, but I'm sure it'll give you some red flags to look out for. And please don't believe that "there are no right or wrong answers"; it's anything but true.

While I don't believe in lying on psychological evaluations, our society is in such a state that we have to lie even then. If I were you, I'd give your son some pointers on how to answer questions, such as staying away from responses involving sex, violence, or death. In America, people who give responses involving these themes are sometimes diagnosed with conditions they don't even have. Encourage your son to substitute romance for sex, hitting a punching bag for violence, and permanently moving away for death. It's sad, but that's life.

I wasn't actually present when my son was assessed. The assessment took place over a period of about 6 weeks from start to finish. It was carried out by Specialist Speech and Language Therapists who started the process by meeting with me to talk about my son and his early life, right from my pregnancy, through his birth and right up to the present day. I had a lengthy questionnaire to complete and take to the meeting. We talked for over 2 hours.

My son was then observed at school - in the classroom, at lunchtime, in the playground. They read reports already prepared by the Educational Psychologist and his community SLT. His class teacher also had an input.

I took my son for two quite lengthy meeting with the assessment team - two women, one of whom he actually already knew from church. I can't remember what I told him about the assessment. I didn't want to say too much before we knew the outcome, so I kept it pretty vague. He only asked about it once. I maybe said that they were interested in getting to know more about him and how he thought.

I remember one of the things they got him to do was to draw something, and they observed him doing that. They said that he got angry when the first drawing wasn't perfect, and he took a long time with the second one and got stressed when they said that he had to finish it within a certain time.

Another thing they did was get him to play a game which he made up himself, then tried to join his game and influence it in some way. They said that his resistance to any influence on how the game was played was evidence of a lack of social imagination. That was quite a revelation to me, as I hadn't clearly understood what was meant by that, and always considered my son to have a rich imagination. He is very imaginative and creative, but it's all on his own terms.

Really, the assessments my son went through were gentle and non-intrusive. They were based largely on play and observation. My son is extremely, extremely talkative and he enjoyed the attention. When I went to collect him at the end of his assessment he wanted me to go away as he was busy!

Edited to add:

My son is 7 years old, and the assessment process seemed to be geared to a child of his age. It was very different from the type of testing that adults envisage, and although the terminology used can be daunting, in practice it seemed to be very informal (although structured and purposeful), and I'm sure my son wasn't even aware of being tested as such.