Cognitive
and educational assessment provides a complete overview of the
strengths and difficulties that an individual experience with respect to
their learning capabilities. These abilities do remain stable though
childhood and adulthood, which means that the assessment can be used as a
form of prediction tool to analyze the academic potential of a child.
Before exploring more about cognitive and educational assessment, let's focus on who should consider taking this and how valuable it can be for them.
Educational Assessment |
Who should consider Cognitive and Educational Assessment?
The
assessments are ideal for individuals who fall between 5 to over 25
years of age, and under special circumstances, it might be used on child
younger than five years too. One does not require exceptional abilities
to receive cognitive and educational assessment, as those who are
suffering from specific conditions such as:
- Difficulty with learning language
- Difficulty while writing or reading
- Difficulty while memorizing
- Poor concentration or attention
- Difficulty to process essential information
- Exceeding in multiple areas of the academics
Educational Assessment |
Remember:
cognitive and educational assessment is a form of comprehensive
assessment, where information is gathered from teachers, parents and
caregivers on the academic profile of the individual and then
collaborated the findings with the performance of the individual in a
basic assessment. The main purpose of conducting this is to acquire
accurate profile of the individual's reasoning, thinking and
intellectual functioning skills and then assisting them in developing
successful learning strategies.
What Abilities Are Tested in Cognitive Assessment?
Cognitive
and education, both are two independent parts of the assessment. This
is the reason why the qualities that are tested in cognitive and
educational assessments are different as well. In case of cognitive
assessment, the elements that are assessed include:
- Perceptual Reasoning: This involves the visual perceptual reasoning of the individual and their ability to solve simple or complex numerical problems.
- Verbal Comprehension: This addresses conceptualization and verbal reasoning, like thinking with the help of words and then expressing different thoughts with the use of words.
- Academic Readiness: Though children may not be able to write or read prior to their schooling, still simple things such as whether the child can hold a pencil properly or use the scissors are analyzed here.
- Social Readiness:
Children must socialize so as to interact with their peers or teachers.
Here, various things elements like compromise, share, taking turns and
working together as a team is considered.
What Abilities are tested in Educational Assessment?
Educational
assessment is not the same as cognitive, because here the focus is
purely on the academic skills of the child. The various elements that
are assessed in educational assessment are:
- Mathematics: Average time taken to solve mathematical problems, complexity with numbers and approach towards problems.
- Comprehension: Both reading and then decoding are observed to see whether a child is able to understand the concept on their own or not.
- Oral Expressive Skills: The words that are used by child for expressing emotions such as happiness, anger, distress or frustration are also monitored.
- Spelling: Is the child able to spell simple words properly and can understand the difference between the words that may sound same but have different spellings.
From
attention, language and speech, emotional and psychological functioning
to fine motor skills, auditory processing, concept knowledge and
behaviour, there is so much that can be examined with the help of the
right cognitive and educational assessment. So, if an individual suffers
from learning difficulties and wants to evaluate the intensity of this
condition there cannot be a better idea than performing the best
assessment.