Frequently Asked Questions

The most common assessments we carry out include:

• Cognitive Assessments – These assess one’s overall intellectual ability (sometimes referred to as their ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ). It is usually used to determine whether someone is intellectually disabled or gifted, or if there are areas of functioning that may be impaired so as to warrant learning supports or specialist placements. This assessment is also often necessary to rule in/out global intellectual disabilities when another professional is trying to determine if a person might be presenting with other difficulties, such as dyspraxia or Developmental Language Disorder.
• Educational and Psycho-Educational Assessments – These assessments use standardised tests to ascertain one’s IQ score, as well as reading, spelling, and numeracy abilities. The results are then used to determine whether or not a person is attaining at predicted rates, or if they meet the criteria for a specific learning difficulty (SLD), such as dyslexia or dyscalculia.
• Emotional and Behavioural Assessments – This assessment requires parents or other close family members — and sometimes teachers — to complete behaviour checklists and participate in clinical interviews. Depending on the age of the person attending, they would also be administered measures/checklists/interviews to determine whether or not they might be presenting with an emotional/behavioural difficulty. This assessment type can be very broad or very specific, depending on the nature of the referral question. Some families are very clearly querying whether or not their child/other family member is presenting with anxiety and others may have a concern around attention or concentration skills. Where there are numerous learning and emotional/behavioural concerns, this assessment is often combined with either a cognitive or psycho-educational assessment, as described above.
• Intellectual Disability
• ADHD
• Autism
• Bespoke Assessments

• For some, parents have had concerns for many years and would like clarification on whether or not their child has a definitive difficulty or if they just need some more dedicated practice in a specific area of difficulty.
• Many times, people book assessments due to concerns raised by their child’s school in relation to any area of learning, emotions, behaviour, or socialisation.
• In some instances, another professional (speech and language therapist or occupational therapist, GP, mental health professional, public health nurse, etc) may have expressed concerns in another area of your or your child’s development. In these cases, we can first discuss whether or not further assessment and what type of assessment is needed. We can then decide how to proceed.
• Other children may have been diagnosed with an SLD and parents may return for an assessment themselves because many of the child’s presenting difficulties echoes struggles they themselves had in school.

In short, people come for an assessment if the family, school, or the young person/adult themselves are concerned that they might have a learning or emotional/behavioural difficulty that they might need support for.

• Many people also come with a specific question, for example:
• ‘Is my child eligible for an exemption from Irish?’
• ‘Will I be able to access the Disability Access Route to third level Education (DARE)?’
• ‘Is my child eligible for Reasonable Accommodations on state exams (RACE)?’

All these questions can only be answered following the completion of an assessment.

• You will be provided with a clinical policy and consent form to review, complete, sign, and send into the office by post or email.
• Before meeting you/your child, we will request some specific information from yourself and the (pre-)school and will review all the documents you organise for submission to us.
• We may also send out some additional checklists and/or additional referral information forms to guide the assessment process to be completed by you and the teacher prior to the clinic appointment.
• Questionnaires returned from parents and teachers will be scored — the information received will guide the planning for the clinic session.

The day of the clinic assessment:

Both parent and child (or whoever is being assessed) should arrive at the clinic at the scheduled time.

• The attending clinician will introduce themselves and give a brief outline of what the assessment will entail to both the parent(s) and the child.
• Following this, parents in attendance will be asked to leave the assessment room, except in exceptional circumstances where if parents wish to stay, this will need to be discussed with the attending clinician the appropriateness of parents staying in the room.
• Following the approximately 2-hour assessment, the person being assessed will be asked to wait out in the waiting room or in their car if they prefer while the attending clinician analyses the data. Some clinicians will give preliminary data on the day. Dr Cassidy tends to give full feedback on the day of the assessment. However, please note that many clinicians prefer to schedule a separate feedback session on a different day. But please also note that if you have a full feedback session on the day of the assessment, you will not have a separate feedback session on a later date. However, for ADHD and Autism assessments, there is always an additional feedback session to discuss the results on a different day to field any additional questions on more complex assessments.
• The parent(s) will then be called into the attending clinician’s office to discuss the preliminary results of the assessment (the child will remain in the waiting room during this time).
  • This can take between 30 minutes and an hour. On very rare occasions, the child will be allowed in with their parents, though this is deemed inappropriate in most instances.
  • For older teenagers and adults, it is usually entirely appropriate for the one being assessed to be present for the results. This is determined on a case-by-case basis.

After the clinic assessment:

A formal written report is produced, which analyses the test results and identifies the
child’s learning pattern, strengths, and weaknesses.

• The report will also delineate the information gathered during the observations and interviews which support any conclusions drawn.
• We also include relevant individualised recommendations.
• Report writing is approximately a 6–8-week process; we spend considerable time on this as it represents your child, so we want it to be as accurate and useful as possible.

Many children enjoy the assessment process, as IQ tests are set up as a series of games and tasks broken up into short segments. Many will involve them looking at puzzles or pictures, and figuring out what goes with what, or what comes next in a pattern. Some tests will examine memory, others at verbal comprehension — some will even look at their understanding of social and moral norms. The IQ test is usually followed by some tests of attainment, which will likely look at your child’s ability to read, write, and do arithmetic, but they may be restricted to only the area of concern.

Emotional and behavioural assessments may involve the process described above for the IQ testing and psycho-educational assessments, but will usually also include some behaviour checklists to be completed by knowledgeable informants such as parents, teachers, or partners/family members of the person being assessed.

ADHD assessments are similar to the emotional and behavioural assessments described above in that they generally include an IQ test and some behavioural checklists, but also include a much wider range of additional checklists to from multiple perspectives to determine if attentional difficulties occur across multiple settings.

Autism assessments generally involve 2-3 clinic visits and vary depending on what level of assessment each person needs. The autism assessments will involve one play-based assessment with 2 specialist clinicians, one extended developmental interview with 2 clinicians or 1 clinician and one Assistant Psychologist, and depending on the needs of the person being assessed, may also include IQ testing or additional checklists as above.

OCD and anxiety/NECOA assessments involve a two-hour assessment with one of our NECOA team. This is an extended interview and depending on the number of areas of concern may require more than 2 hours. Families should allow for more than the 2-hour assessment here and additional administration time is billable based on the clinician’s standard consultation rate.

While the testing process can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavour, it’s also an extremely informative one, and can be very empowering for parents and young people. For example, assessments can help you find out:

• Your child’s individual strengths and weaknesses.
• Whether they are stronger visual or auditory learners.
• What their spatial or receptive and expressive language skills are like.

Remember that while an IQ score is only a number, it represents a composite of various skill sets your child presents with and it is also ranked in relation to what would be expected for your child’s age group. Therefore, knowing the areas your child is strong or weak in will enable you to help them learn better. Similarly, knowing whether your child’s decoding skills are much weaker/stronger than their reading comprehension skills will enable you to tailor their literacy support, if needed, precisely to where their difficulty lies.

At the end of the assessment process, you will also get a whole list of recommendations outlining what you should do next to best support your child’s needs.

Though some people object to IQ testing as it measures only one type of intelligence (i.e., conceptual intelligence, this process is generally empowering rather than limiting. An assessment should be conducted, not with the sole purpose of labelling a child, but with the purpose of helping them to reach their potential.

This largely depends on the type of assessment that you have sought.

You will receive a verbal preliminary result on the day of the assessment. While the results analysis can sometimes take longer than the time available on the day of the assessment, the child’s performance will be discussed in detail with the parents. All concerns and observations will be outlined in great detail to parents, guardians, and/or other relevant parties.

Official psychological reports detailing the outcomes, findings, and recommendations that have arisen from the assessment are typically completed within a month of the assessment. You will typically receive them between four and six weeks post-assessment. In some instances, this time frame can be somewhat longer, for example:

• When we are waiting for behaviour checklists to be completed by third parties (e.g., teachers, social workers, parents who were unable to attend the clinic on the day).
• When it is decided on the day of the assessment that some additional testing is needed.

There are also times of the year when reports are in high demand (e.g., immediately before all school breaks) and this can create a somewhat longer wait time for reports. However, the clinic endeavours to complete reports within 6-8 weeks of the time the full assessment was completed.

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