What a school assessment of a child actually involves

What this page is, and what it is not

This is an explainer for adults about how children are assessed. It is not a test, it is not a checklist, and there is nothing here to fill in about a child.

That needs saying at the top because the search that brings people here usually wants the other thing. A parent who is worried about a nine-year-old wants an answer today, and the internet is full of pages that will supply one. This site does not publish assessments of children, in either direction: no test a child answers about themselves, and no questionnaire a parent answers about a child. The reasons are set out at the end, and the short version is that the output of such a page would be a number about a child, which is the one thing this site refuses to print about anyone.

What is genuinely useful, and what follows, is knowing what the real process looks like before you are in it. Assessments are slow, they involve several people you have not met, and the vocabulary is unfamiliar. Most of the distress around them comes from not knowing the shape.

Who carries it out

The central professional is usually a school psychologist, called an educational psychologist in the UK. The National Association of School Psychologists describes the training as at least a specialist-level degree, which typically requires 3 years of full-time graduate study, with coursework in psychological and educational assessment, academic and behavioural interventions, counselling and consultation, and special education and diversity. Many hold a national certification on top of state licensure.

That person does not work alone. Depending on what is being asked, an assessment can draw in a class teacher, a special educational needs coordinator, a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist, a paediatrician, an audiologist and an optometrist. The list is long because the first job is ruling things out, not ruling something in.

In the United States the process has a statutory shape. A child's initial evaluation must be full and individual, focused on that child and only that child. Before a school may proceed, parents must give their informed written consent, and the evaluation must be conducted within 60 days of receiving that consent or within a state timeframe that supersedes it. The evaluation must use a variety of assessment tools and strategies, and the rule on this is categorical: under the relevant law it is inappropriate and unacceptable to base any eligibility decision upon the results of only one procedure. Parents are part of the group that determines eligibility, not recipients of its conclusion.

In the UK the route usually starts inside the school. The government guidance is to talk to the teacher or the special educational needs coordinator if you think your child needs support, and the school puts that support in place first. If more is needed, you can ask your local authority to carry out an assessment for an education, health and care plan, and a request can also be made by anyone else who thinks an assessment may be necessary, including doctors, health visitors, teachers, parents and family friends.

Other countries route it differently again, through a family doctor, an insurer or a regional service, but the destination is the same in every system worth having: several people, several settings, and more than one kind of evidence.

The questionnaires, and who actually scores them

Parents and teachers are asked to fill in rating forms, and this is the part of the process most parents meet first. It helps to know what the common ones are, who fills them in, and where they sit in the decision.

• The NICHQ Vanderbilt Assessment Scale. Used for children aged 6 to 12, with separate informant forms for parents and teachers. Each has two components: a symptom section and a section on impairment in performance, which is the part about how school and home are actually going.
• The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, usually called the SDQ. A brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 2 to 17 year olds, with 25 items covering emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity and inattention, peer relationship problems and prosocial behaviour. The same 25 items go to parents or teachers of 4 to 17 year olds, and there is a self-report version suitable for young people aged around 11 to 17, depending on their level of understanding and literacy.
• The Conners 4. A thorough assessment of symptoms and impairments associated with ADHD, as well as common co-occurring problems and disorders, in young people aged 6 to 18. Parent and teacher forms cover 6 to 18 and the self-report covers 8 to 18, and the publisher lists it at qualification level B.
• The M-CHAT-R/F, for much younger children, which is a screening tool used before an assessment rather than as one.

Two things about that list matter more than the names.

The first is that these are not free-floating web forms, and their publishers say so. The SDQ's distributors state that the questionnaires, in English or in translation, are copyright documents that are not in the public domain and may not be modified in any way, while allowing paper versions to be downloaded and photocopied without charge by individuals or non-profit organisations provided they are not making any charge to families. The Conners 4 is a qualification-level B product, which means the purchaser has to show professional credentials before they can buy it. The M-CHAT-R/F is blunter still: reposting it is not allowed without a licence agreement, no modifications can be made to the title, items or instructions without permission from the authors, and no enhancements can be made to the instrument, including the addition of audio or visual material. That last clause is aimed precisely at websites.

The second is that a completed form is an input, not an output. It is scored by the clinician or psychologist running the assessment, alongside everything else. That is why the forms go to more than one adult: on ADHD specifically, the guidance is that providers ask parents, teachers and other adults who care for the child about the child's behaviour in different settings, including at home, at school and with peers. Two forms that disagree are not a problem with the forms. The disagreement is data.

Why so much of an assessment is about ruling things out

A large part of the process is not about the thing you came in worried about. It is about everything else that produces the same account from a teacher.

There is no single test for the conditions parents most often ask about. On ADHD, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says so directly, and describes a medical exam including hearing and vision tests to rule out other problems with symptoms like ADHD. It also notes that many other problems, such as sleep disorders, anxiety, depression and certain types of learning disability, can have symptoms similar to ADHD.

Put in the order an assessment actually runs, the early questions are unglamorous and cheap. Can the child hear the teacher from where they sit. Can they see the board. How much sleep are they getting, and is it broken. Has something changed at home. Is the work at the right level, or has a reading difficulty made every subject harder at once. Is this new, and if so, new since when.

Parents sometimes read this stage as being fobbed off. It is the opposite. A hearing test is faster, cheaper and more reversible than anything further down the list, and the number of children whose difficulty turns out to be a solvable sensory or sleep problem is not small.

What the cognitive testing is, and why it cannot happen in a browser

Where an assessment does include cognitive testing, it looks nothing like an online quiz. The most widely used instrument for school-age children measures intellectual ability across five cognitive domains, covers ages 6 years 0 months to 16 years 11 months, takes around an hour for the core subtests alone, and is delivered one to one by an examiner. Its publisher sells it at qualification level C, the most restricted tier.

The reason it takes an hour with a person in the room is that most of what the examiner learns is not the score. It is how the child approached a task, where they gave up, whether they asked for help, what they did when something got hard, and whether the same child was present in the fourth subtest as in the first. None of that survives a form.

The professional standards that govern this, published jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, are described by their publisher as the gold standard in guidance on testing in the United States and in many other countries. They set out what norms, reliability, validity and fairness require before a score means anything. A browser quiz meets none of it.

What an online score about a nine-year-old is, and is not, worth

It is worth stating plainly, because the pages offering these numbers are numerous, free and confident.

An online test that prints an IQ number or a condition label for a child has no norm sample for children, no standardised administration, no observer, no second setting and no second informant. What it measures is what happened in one browser tab on one afternoon: how tired the child was, how interested, how well they read the questions, whether an older sibling was leaning over the chair, and whether the page was designed to return flattering results because flattering results get shared.

It also does something a bad adult test does not do. It attaches a number to a person who did not choose to be measured and cannot argue with the result, and it hands that number to the adults who decide what that child is like. Children are remarkably good at detecting what the adults around them have decided, and remarkably bad at getting a verdict revised.

The rule that governs real assessments is the useful one to carry: no eligibility decision may rest on a single procedure. An online score is not merely a weak procedure, it is one procedure, administered by nobody, with no norms. It does not belong in the folder you take to a meeting, and a school will not treat it as evidence.

None of that means the worry is wrong. A parent who runs an online test is usually a parent who has noticed something real and does not know who to ask. The noticing is the valuable part. The number added nothing to it.

What to bring to a first conversation

Whether the first conversation is with a class teacher, a special educational needs coordinator or a family doctor, the same preparation helps, and none of it involves scoring anything.

• Dated examples rather than adjectives. Three or four specific occasions, with roughly when they happened and what actually occurred. A teacher can work with a described Tuesday. Nobody can work with the word struggling.
• What school has already said, in writing where it exists. Reports, marked work, notes home, anything from a previous year that shows whether this is new.
• When it started, and what else changed around then. A house move, a new baby, a bereavement, a change of class, a change of timetable, an illness.
• Sleep, in numbers. What time the child goes to bed, what time they actually fall asleep, whether they wake, and what time they get up on a school day.
• Whether hearing and vision have ever been checked, and when.
• What already helps. A seat at the front, a shorter task, a quiet room, a timer, a break. Things that work are diagnostic in their own way.
• What your child says about it, in their words rather than yours.
• The one question you most want answered, written at the top, so it survives a short meeting.

One thing to leave at home: a conclusion. Arriving with a condition already named narrows the conversation to agreeing or disagreeing with you, when the useful version is a description of a child that several adults can add to.

What this site does and does not have for children

MyTestAtlas is written for adults about themselves. There is no children's section, no child ADHD or autism check, no parent-report questionnaire about a child, and no reading age, IQ number or grade level for anyone.

The reasoning is the same one that runs through the rest of the catalogue. Every route here says on its own page what it cannot do, and on the routes that touch health it says a clinician who takes a history and rules out other explanations is the only thing that answers the question. That refusal does not get weaker when the person being described is nine and cannot read the disclaimer.

If your child is old enough to be curious, the timed games in this catalogue are games and can be played as such: the result describes what happened in that sitting on that device, and it is not compared with anyone. That is the whole of what is on offer, and the rest of this page is the more useful thing.