Psycholinguistic/
Educational
Evaluations
The evaluation process at JSLC is comprehensive, complete and timely. It contains information regarding the thinking process. It involves all aspects of cognition as found in the Woodcock-Johnson IV, Test of Cognitive Abilities:
- Comprehensive-Knowledge- the depth and breadth of a person’s acquired knowledge
- Vocabulary- word knowledge
- Fluid Reasoning- the ability to draw inference, mental flexibility and form concepts
- Short-Term Working Memory- one’s ability to hold information and manipulate it
- Long-Term Retrieval- one’s ability to retrieve information and use it later in the process of thinking
- Cognitive Processing Speed- one’s ability to perform simple and complex tasks particularly when under pressure to sustain attention.
- Perceptual Speed- one’s ability to encode (write) and decode (read)
- Auditory memory span- one’s ability to receive, manipulate and recall verbal information
- Auditory Processing- one’s ability to encode, synthesize and discriminate auditory (verbal) information. It incorporates phonological awareness, phonological processing and phonetic coding- the necessary strands for successful reading
- Visual Processing- one’s ability to perceive, analyze and think with visual patterns
- Number Facility- one’s ability to manipulate numbers in working memory
Further included in the evaluation process is Linguistics:
- Receptive Language- one’s ability to process incoming information and attach meaning to it through listening and reading
- Expressive Language- one’s ability to take processed information and use it in speaking and writing
- Social Language- the use of language in social contexts. It encompasses social interaction, social cognition, pragmatics, and language processing.
Reading Assessment
Reading assessment provides an in-depth view of an one’s reading abilities including: sight word reading fluency, phonetic decoding, prosody, reading rate measured in low volume reading and high volume, timed reading, spontaneous oral reading, silent reading using both timed and untimed formats.
Mathematics Assessment:
As assessment of word problems; fluency with math facts or automaticity in math; and calculation, the fundamentals of math necessary to build more complex concepts.
Written Expression includes:
An assessment of one’s ability to use spontaneous spelling, capitalization and punctuation in sentences, paragraphs and in narrative form using plot, characterization, varied sentence forms, and age-appropriate vocabulary to formulate.