In this episode, Andrew Greenfield looks at the subject of psychometric assessments. It's one we hear a lot about, but don't fully understand the implications and how it all works. He unpacks it all in this episode of the Being Comfortable Uncomfortable podcast. I'm your host Anthony Pearl. Well, welcome everyone. Andrew, I wanted to talk to you in this episode about a subject that I know you spend a lot of time working on, but I feel like most of us probably don't have a great understanding of, and that's psychometric assessments. So do you want to just introduce a little people what it is and what it's about? Yeah, so psychometric assessments, I guess, is a general term. That means, I guess, an assessment of someone's, most of the time, it's the measure of their cognitive ability. It's often a measure of their achievements ability as well. So it's combination of those factors. So more often than not measuring your cognitive ability is done by an IQ assessment, and that's a formal valid and reliable assessment tool. And measuring often the achievement components is done by a measure of literacy, maths, skills, that type of thing. So writing skills. So it's combination of those components. It's often referred to as, yeah, psychometric testing, educational assessment, IQ testing, academic achievement testing, it all basically psychometric assessment encompasses all of that. What sort of picture does it paint for you of someone once they've done an assessment like this? It can be used, I guess, for a number of purposes. To go back a step further, I mean, sometimes there are varying reasons to why people would want a psychometric assessment. Sometimes that they have specific, they're wondering if their child has a specific learning difficulty in any aspect of literacy maths. That's one reason. Sometimes they got a suspected cognitive difficulties, whether it's a measure of their processing speed or their working memory or their general cognitive skills. Sometimes it could be they think a child is quite gifted and bright and want to get a measure of that. Sometimes it could be the opposite where they think they've got an intellectual disability. So it could be for a combination of those reasons, but it could also be people often do a psychometric assessment for no particular reason. They just want to be able to find out what their child's cognitive ability is, what their strengths, what their weaknesses are. And I guess the added bonus in that is to try and be quite specific to see if there are only learning difficulties or not. So there are a lot of various reasons to have an assessment. I suppose there's two aspects to it as a child or even as a parent that might be being asked to get this full of their child. It's not really something to be scared of though, but it feels scary. Yeah, and my job as a child psychologist is to make sure that every child is comfortable as possible. And I kind of pride myself in, you would think that's what we do, but you know, it's often, I'm not going to get anything out of a child unless I establish a report with a child no matter what the age, whether they're five or whether they're 17. So I have to make sure that the child is comfortable or the teen or the adolescent is comfortable before getting anything out of them. And I think that's our job. That's what we're there to do is to make sure that they're comfortable because then at least that way we know that we're going to get the most that we can out of them. And that's what I want to be able to do as well. And I often say to the student that's in front of me that my job is to worry about how you're doing, not your job. And if I think I need more information from them or if I think I need them to repeat things or if I think they know the answer, but they're not necessarily telling it to me within obviously the constraints of the assessment tool, I need to make sure that I'm getting that out of them. And that's how I try and make them feel as comfortable as possible. So they don't have to worry how they're doing and that I do. But I said, it could be the reason for doing the assessment is to find out, you know, set what their cognitive ability, their strengths, their weaknesses, and to be as specific as possible, often there is a referral reason as to why they're coming. There may be a technical difficulty in some area or not. So my job is to not go in there trying to come up with a yes, no answer. I'm often getting a lot more information. And it's about gathering information as well. Part of that also, part of a psychometric assessment could also be behavioral as well to some degree where we often give questionnaires to parents and teachers and that looks at issues like attention, behavior anxiety, mood, that type of thing. And often I'm putting all of that information together at the end of the day to try and find out, to create a really good picture about what's happening for that child. And how subjective is it then if you're getting these from, you know, you're getting from multiple sources really isn't it? And you've got to try and interpret that into something reasonable. So I'll start with the IQ assessment first. So there's a certain IQ assessment that's called the WIPC, the Wexler preschool and primary intelligent scale. And that's generally from two and a half really up to about seven. There's always a crossover with these assessment tools and everything's all age appropriate. Then from the age of six to 16, you've got what's called the Wexler intelligent scale. And that's the whisk, commonly known as the whisk. And then you've got the waste, which is the Wexler adult intelligent scale. And that's from the age of 16 onwards up to about 90. I think there are norms, valid norms up to that age. So there's always a crossover amongst all of those assessment tools, but that's the IQ test. And that's not why I spy reading on writing ability at all. Because often that's a parent's concern. Well, if we're going to give my child an IQ assessment is, you know, well, they have difficulty reading or they have difficulty understanding or comprehending. I said, well, that's a completely different measure. That's the academic achievement. So an actual IQ test is not biased by any form of reading or writing at all. And generally with an IQ assessment, there are four main measures. I mean, every test is going to be slightly different. There are two main tests, I guess, generally that we use in Australia. One is the Wexler scales that I've just mentioned. There's also the Stanford Van A. So it's generally one of those two that are most likely to be used. There are a few others, but didn't generally be the most commonly used for the IQ assessment. Another thing that people often ask me is that do we just find out my child's IQ and often they want to know, what is my child's IQ? And back in the 70s, we talked about a number. We talked about you've got an IQ of 100. Somebody else has an IQ of 107. Does that mean they're smarter than you? Well, we've come a long way. You would hope we don't talk as educational psychologists. We don't talk about the number. We actually talk about the range, the percentile, and something that's called the confidence interval. And what that does, it comes up with a range of scores where there's a 95% chance that always allows for a 5% margin of error. There's a 95% chance that somebody's scores will lie between two numbers because there's always a margin of error. On any given day, you might perform slightly better, slightly worse. So it's not an exact size, but it gives a pretty good indication. And these tests are valid and reliable. It gives a really good indication of what your child cognitive ability is in four main areas. So the very first area is called verbal comprehension. And again, I'm talking about the works list scales, but they're relatively similar with the Stanford Banae. So verbal comprehension, which is measuring a child's verbal ability and ability to be able to respond to tasks, answer questions. The second component is more non-verbal, so visual spatial type of tasks. So looking at child's eye for detail and looking at patterns and figuring out what pattern comes next, that type of thing. So it's non-verbal reasoning. We also measure what's called working memory. But again, working memory is that mental manipulation in your head. It looks at auditory and visual memory, and it also looks at short-term memory, working memory, and sequential memory. So it's not just good or bad memory. There's different types of memory that it can measure. And the last component is called processing speed, which is just how fast the child will process visual information. So generally, it's a combination of those components, especially more luckier on the works for intelligent scale. And what we're looking for, in terms of doing assessment like that, I'm looking for the interaction between some of those components as well. And we're looking at what they're, are there any particular cognitive strengths and are there any particular weaknesses? So that's the IQ component, which looks at child's general cognitive ability. But you can be at least sort of average plus, high average even superior ability, and have a learning difficulty, which is why we also measure some of the achievement components. And that's a whole measure of different literacy components. And there's lots of different reading components, reading comprehension, reading fluency, word attacks skills, reading rate, reading accuracy. There's a whole range of different components under literacy skills, and then also the maths skills as well, maths reasoning, numerical operations, that type of thing. So often people talk about this term dyslexia, which is a term that's used, you know, it's a very common term that's used by parents and teachers. I don't really use that term, and most educational psychologists wouldn't necessarily use the term dyslexia. And that surprises a lot of parents, because that's what they hear. And often they associate something called dyslexia with reversing numbers or letters, and that's the most comprehensive interpretation of this term dyslexia. We talk about more specific learning difficulty or specific learning disorder. And that's the reason we do that is because there's an actual diagnostic manual that we have to go by. It's called the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. That's a classification of unfortunate word diseases. So there's certain criteria you have to fulfill in order to be able to be diagnosed with, for example, a specific learning disorder. And also I guess a whole range of other disorders like anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD. So what we do is we measure cognitive ability, we measure the achievement ability, and we have a look where the cognitive is, cognitive skills are, and whether they have a learning difficult to be if so, in which particular area. And if you have any form of learning difficulty in any aspect of literacy that can sometimes be called dyslexia. Interesting. I definitely fall into that category where it's a term that is commonly used. And I think there's a lot like that really, isn't there? Because you hear these terminologies and, you know, whether it's autism, ADHD, all of those sort of things tend to be thrown about quite a bit, probably with a lack of real understanding of what they truly mean and what the diagnosis around that means, and even the process for getting it diagnosed. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we talk about, I mean, I can do a whole segment just on ADHD, but I guess older people ask, well, why would you do psychometric assessment? One is to find out specifics about their learning, that is one aspect. But often, psychometric assessments are used in conjunction where you're doing assessment for something like ADHD. Even sometimes autism is not going to be a definitive diagnosis just based on the cognitive assessment or psychometric assessment, but it can be one part of an assessment that can be used. Because if we think about it, you can have a whole lot of different attention and focus symptoms that often classify it as something like ADHD. But you can have those symptoms for a whole lot of different reasons. And often I see a child that has incredibly bright and gifted and they're relatively bored at school and they're not challenged and they're just, they need to seek that stimulation elsewhere because they're knowing everything that they're doing, they're not challenged at all. They will often have attention and focus symptoms. They'll talk to the person next to them because they're bored or they're finished, they work, and they're not challenged. So you can also have the opposite where a child's got severe learning difficulties, and that's not recognized or goes under the radar, and therefore they kind of struggle to keep up and they will have what looks like attention and focus difficulties, even though that's not necessarily the cause at the time. So that's why it's important to get a really good understanding of where the child is at from a cognitive perspective and from a learning perspective. And then in conjunction with that, look, you know, that's needed to look a little bit further into attention symptoms. And again, there are ways and tools that are used for that as well. So the first step is gathering information. And I think that's how these psychometric assessments can be quite useful. Yeah, I was going to say that they're clearly a very useful tool and not something to be afraid of as we talked about. I guess one of the key strategies that results commonly from having undertaken one of these assessments. Yeah, so once we know what a child's cognitive ability is, or if they have a learning difficulty, or if it's the exact opposite, they're incredibly bright and gifted, or you can have a combination of those. You can be very bright and gifted with a learning difficulty. Sometimes that's actually called twice exceptional. That's a term or 2e is a term that's used within an educational system. So you can be bright just having at least high average cognitive ability. Doesn't assume that you don't have a learning difficulty. So there are so many scenarios. So once you know that information, we can then tailor, I guess, the learning of that child based on that information. So, for example, if a child has got very slow processing speed, well, at least once the teacher knows that, then they can at least maybe some cases you can get extra time for tasks, for tests. If you've got a poor working memory, then you make sure that you don't just rely on auditory instruction because it takes a long time to be able to decipher and manipulate that information. So you may, and the teacher would maybe change the instructions to maybe be visual as well as all. So you don't have to rely on your working memory and there's not as much cognitive load on your working memory. So you might have a specific reading difficulty. Once you know that, then you can maybe change the approach to the task or the type of task or how much reading it relies on. You can have a really slow reading rate. So therefore you can have an extra time to be able to read. So once we have that information, the idea is to come up with some sort of individual education plan and often work with schools on that based on our assessments. And that can be really useful for teachers and parents to some degree as well when working with their child and figure out the best way that they learn. Of course, it can also have implications. There are certain things I look for with a child with ADHD. For example, there's a certain profile that they're more likely to be able to perform a certain way on a psychometric assessment. You're certainly not going to use it from a diagnostic perspective at all, but it can certainly be quite useful. Is there often a child with attention issues will have more likely have a poor working memory? They're more likely because as you can understand trying to manipulate information by listening to it if you have difficulty paying attention, you're more likely to struggle with that task that's based on that. If you've got a slow processing speed that's more often than not, it can be affected by attention and focus. And those working memory and the processing components together often call the measure of executive function. An executive function is to do with planning, problem solving, organizational type, skills that type of thing. So it can be really useful to know that information to then say okay well now that we know that information does that child have attention focused difficulties and more often than not, I'm going to sit there in assessment for a child for two or three hours, I'll get some idea about their attention for their skills. But sometimes one-on-one they can be perfect, they can have, it's a relatively unnatural environment. There are minimal distractions, it's one-on-one. So in that situation a child may sit perfectly when focused perfectly well with me for a two-hour period. So we can't just use one piece of information, we need to go as much information as we can. It might be a combination of the psychometric assessment, the observations, we get parent and teacher ratings that help us out. Sometimes we get a hold of, we often get a hold of other reports that the child has had or assessments. So it's a combination of all of that at any one time that we would be looking at. Thanks for your company and please see the show notes for how to get in contact with Andrew Greenfield and don't forget to subscribe for future episodes. And remember it's important to learn how to be comfortably uncomfortable some of the time. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
