Home
Services
Therapuetic Garden
Recent Publications
Recent Research
How You Can Help
Founder
Staff
Sites
Methodology
Diagnostic Evaluations

Psychological Functioning

Cognitive Tools Graph
Cognitive Tools Table
History
Board of Directors
Children ICAD has Served

169 Grove Street

Wellesley, MA 02492

Phone:781-237-1996

email: icadss@att.net

The Institute for Child and Adolescent Development

METHODOLOGY

 

A Word About Our Diagnostic Evaluations
To evaluate various psychological difficulties, including possible learning disabilities and adjustment problems, our agency makes use of psychological test data, in addition to history and interview. On the basis of the results, we recommend whether or not therapy is indicated. If therapy should be indicated we use the data to recommend whether and when the therapy should be structured (the client works with formal tasks presented by the therapists), unstructured (the client determines what is done in the sessions and what is talked about), or some combination of the two approaches. If our data indicate that evaluations by other specialties (e.g., psychiatry; psychopharmacology; neurology) are needed to diagnose the presenting problem, we help arrange for these evaluations and share our findings with them.


Areas of Psychological Functioning Evaluated

Our evaluations follow the view, based upon 30 years of research and clinical experience, that how a person thinks is as important as what a person thinks. In addition, we believe that experiences in the first four years of a child's development play a central role in her/his academic, intellectual, cognitive and personality development. Four broad areas are evaluated:

Tests of cognitive functioning provide data about the unique ways a person gathers information, focuses attention on what is relevant to the task at hand, compares present and past information, and conceptually organizes information.

Tests of intelligence, in addition to providing IQ scores, intelligence tests help determine whether and under what circumstances the person's intelligence is operating efficiently or is being compromised, either because the person uses faulty ways of gathering information (cognitive functions), or the person's intellectual activity is preoccupied with personal problems, or both.

Personality Tests provide measures of the private thoughts, meanings, fantasies and emotions, conscious and unconscious, that represent a person's past experiences, on the one hand, and, on the other, what a person introduces into and expects from current situations. These meanings/fantasies/emotions are assessed at three levels:
(1) embodied meanings or body image: with one procedure, the person assumes body postures, performs simple movements, and describes what the various body experiences bring to mind. With another procedure, the person examines various objects with touch perception only, and describes what the tactile experiences bring to mind;
(2) fantasy: the child examines ink blots and describes what they could be, and also looks at pictures and constructs a story about what is going on;
(3) language: the child verbally completes sentences, a part of which the examiner speaks, and also discusses questions raised by the examiner in an interview.

Tests of academic abilities provide data about learning skills (e.g., reading comprehension, math, spelling etc.) expected for a person's age and grade.

Methodology Cognitive Tools Graph Cognitive Tools Table

A non-profit organization helping children grow within in spite of storms without

Copyright © 2002 ICAD. All rights reserved.