There are basically two options for getting an Educational Evaluation for your child. They are the public school system or a private provider (educational psychologist or neuropsychologist.) A neuropsychologist is your most qualified option.

Option #1: Publicly Paid For Educational Evaluation

Public schools must provide an educational evaluation for any child suspected of having a learning disability. They have to provide the evaluation at no cost to you. However, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” often applies when it comes to public school evaluations.

The school system will test your child. They will tell you if she has a learning disability and the area of disability they determine. Unfortunately, the educational evaluation is often not in depth. It’s often lacking information about underlying causes such as processing, memory, etc.

For example, your school may tell you your child has a disability in math computation.  You can probably figure that out by yourself!

Be aware, if you go to the school system, they may also THINK they can tell you how to school your child. It all depends on their understanding of regulations (which is often poor). Some school systems make parent’s lives miserable. That’s because they think they have a right to dictate a child’s schooling based on an educational evaluation.

Option #2: A Private Educational Evaluation

The second alternative is having a professional educational evaluation by a private provider. Privately provided educational evaluations are only as good as the evaluator, so be careful who you choose.

We totally wasted our money once by picking someone based upon an advertisement. The next time, we had an excellent educational evaluation by a highly qualified neuropsychologist.  It’s best to find a highly qualified neuropsychologist through a recommendation, like we did. Our recommendation came from a special education attorney’s office.

A great neuropsychologist evaluates all aspects of a child’s cognitive functioning. The testing looks at short-term, working memory, long-term memory, attention, processing speeds, comprehension, executive functioning, etc.  While you know your child is struggling, you don’t know which cognitive processes are CAUSING your child’s learning problems.

Why Get a Comprehensive, Private Educational Evaluation

Without knowing the root cause of your child’s learning struggles, it is difficult to know precisely how to meet your child’s needs.

If her working-memory is an issue, then you need to work on strengthening her memory. You want to increase the amount of information she can hold in her head and manipulate.

If her verbal processing skills, processing speed, reasoning skills, etc. are a problem, then you need to address the causes. Whatever is at the heart of her learning difficulty, that is the skill you need to improve.

The root causes are important, because otherwise you waste instructional time providing the wrong programs.

As a real-case example, two brothers were both diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder.  The older brother’s ADHD was “Inattentive type, secondary to dyslexia and executive functioning.”  The younger brother’s ADHD was a “Combined type ADHD, Primary.”

What does that mean? It means the oldest brother’s attention deficits are due to his dyslexia and executive functioning (planning, sequencing, etc.) difficulties. For the oldest, when his dyslexia and executive functioning disorder were overcome, his ADHD disappeared.

Conversely, for the younger brother, his ADHD is primary. It is the CAUSE of his difficulties with comprehension, memory, etc. As a root cause, managing the ADHD itself enables the younger brother to keep his mind on his studies a LOT better.

A Great Educational Evaluation is the Key to Learning Success

As a parent, you aren’t likely to be able to determine if your child’s attention issues are primary or secondary. If ADHD is primary, treating the ADHD is the key. If the ADHD is secondary, then addressing the primary cognitive issues can overcome the ADHD.  Only a highly qualified neuropsychologist can determine the exact problems through an educational evaluation.

By you obtaining a comprehensive educational evaluation, you know exactly what areas of cognition you to work on with your child. The biggest hurdle with such an evaluation is cost.. It is EXPENSIVE. A neuropsychologist usually charges about $1500-$3000 for a comprehensive educational evaluation. The evaluation takes place over multiple days. Insurance doesn’t usually cover educational evaluations unless ADHD is the PRIMARY diagnosis, then it is sometimes considered a medical issue.

Unconventional Educational Evaluation Alternatives

If you can’t scrape up the money for testing, then I recommend using multi-sensory instructional methods and cognitive processing exercises. You can use these as a blanket attempt to meet your child’s unidentified needs.

For general cognitive enhancement, we used Lexia Learning’s Cross Trainer. It is online and You can check it out here: http://www.lexialearning.co.nz/crosstrainer.html

For multi-sensory math instruction, Math-U-See is really good. Other good math programs are Cuisenaire Rods and Base Ten. Any math program with manipulatives and preferably an audio/visual component too will be multisensory.

Orton-Gillingham reading programs are multi-sensory (although some are very limited in their multi-sensory components).  You can learn more about learning styles and multisensory teaching at:
https://learningabledkids.com/multi_sensory_training/Page01-Welcome.htm

Depending on the severity of your child’s problems, you may be able to get away without an educational evaluation.  However, as you try various programs, you may not be hitting on your child’s actual needs. Getting a comprehensive, private educational evaluation lets you know exactly which cognitive and academic skills to focus on.