00e75960

Educational Psychology and Home Education

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 01:59:35 GMT

How is Educational Psychology relevant to Home Educated young people?

Firstly a bit about my path to being an independent EP specialising in learning assessments…

I’m now an independent Educational Psychologist, before this I was a local authority EP for many years. As an independent EP, I chose to focus on assessments of learning and skills, which seemed to be the best combination of the aspects of EP work I enjoy, what parents (and schools) often want, and what fits in best with my time and family life. I like the ‘detective’ work of investigating a person’s profile of abilities, pinpointing where their needs are and perhaps why, and building confidence by identifying areas of skill.

I have three children, two in school and one home educated. I understand the home education path, I’ve been part of Home Ed community groups for a while so I’m very familiar with the wide range of issues that parents of home educated children have often been through. I also value schools and teachers, acknowledging that there are so many out there working their hardest to try to meet needs in a difficult context of budget and time constraints and a range of pressures put upon them. I have good working relationships with many schools, and am fortunate that my two school-educated children enjoy their school. So I can see and empathise with education taking place in school or at home; many young people have spent time in school and then been home educated, and vice versa. Some young people will be home educated for some time, and then may return to education in school or college if there are certain qualifications they want or need to obtain. Therefore learning assessments can be useful for a variety of reasons, and can be of benefit to parents during the home education stage, and to teaching staff for young people who return to school or college.

What can I offer to Home Educated children and their families?

People may wonder how Educational Psychology and home education fit together, but I think they are a very good match. EPs are not “school psychologists;” in fact, my Doctorate qualification specifically says “Educational, Child and Community Psychology.” EPs have training in child development, learning, mental health and wellbeing, and all training is focused on the needs of the child and how to make accommodations and interventions that meet needs. This is relevant whether children are educated in school or at home.

Like many professions, local authority EPs are constrained by budgets, monitoring, political landscapes and administration. Also, many of children’s learning needs are unidentified, undefined, still being researched, and it can be the million-dollar question about what interventions will work, often requiring several rounds of trial and error. That is why I start with assessments: these are not solely simple assessments of literacy and numeracy levels, which may be irrelevant to home educators not following a specific curriculum, but assessments of the processes of learning, such as working memory, processing skills, comprehension, reasoning and problem solving. Knowing more about a child’s abilities and strengths helps understand the skills they can use to their benefit and builds their confidence, just as knowing more about their needs helps determine what kind of interventions or resources could be utilised to enhance those areas.

When I do assessments, I avoid the lengthy reports that can be full of difficult terminology; these don’t tell people much about what they need to know, and are too often criticised for being overly generic. I see many of these that are a long list of general interventions and resources, based on minimal individualized information. Instead, I provide detailed assessment information that children, parents (and schools if relevant) can use to really understand a child’s profile and develop a learning pathway to match. For children who have been in school, or may return to school, assessments can help parents and teachers understand their needs and progress, as well as plan for their future learning.

I don’t feel it is my place to advise what specific interventions or resources should be used – that is a matter of preference, resource availability and suitability for the parents or teachers providing the education and support. I often have discussions with educators about possible interventions, but I don’t feel it is appropriate for me to stipulate what targets someone should be working towards or how they should proceed. In a school situation, it can be a difficult position because if an EP advises certain targets, interventions or resources, the people involved feel duty bound to use those and unable to make alternative arrangements or decisions. Instead, experienced educators, including parents, should be free to implement the resources and strategies they prefer, with my assessments providing the information they need to help them identify areas for intervention and support. Education and support are a fluid process of metacognition, intervention and monitoring that it should be up to the educators and learners to work on themselves.

As well as assessments of learning, I also have many others to offer, including questionnaire-based measures, that look at a wider range of needs. For example, language and communication, self-concept, and executive function (eg. cognitive regulation, emotional regulation and behavioural regulation). I can also offer the ADI interview schedule with parents who are concerned that their child is showing ASD traits (this is NOT a diagnosis, but provides information about areas of ASD and how children can be supported in any areas of need identified). Similarly I have questionnaires that relate to areas of ADHD and can help provide information for parents who are considering whether or not their child may have ADHD. Again, it is not to provide a diagnosis but can be of help for parents currently on the waiting list for their child to go through the diagnostic process or considering requesting to be put on the pathway.

I’m happy to hear from any parents of young people who would benefit from assessments of learning.

Why is assessment a bad word?!

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:32:57 GMT

It’s often assumed that assessments of education are bad. Why?

It’s often assumed that assessments of education are bad. Why? What are people assuming is being assessed? Long gone are the IQ testing days, which had so many criticisms: what is IQ? How is it tested? Do IQ tests actually test intelligence? People in professions, the media, the government, or social media make a claim about assessments, but who is actually looking in to the research that has been done behind the scenes for decades in producing assessments that are as reliable and valid as possible?

Modern assessments of learning are not about finding one overall score, and certainly not one single IQ score. They’re not about finding what people do badly or to find areas of criticism or what they could be stopped from doing (such as over 100 years ago, when IQ testing was sometimes used to determine which people should not be educated). Far from it: modern assessments equally want to know where people perform well, as well as what they find difficult, and how their areas of difficulty can be helped to improve. Finding what people are good at can help in the areas they are struggling and build confidence.

Assessments are about investigating a range of skills such as processing, reasoning, working memory, spatial skills, language (understanding and expressive), comprehension , and much more. Assessing a wide range of abilities helps build a profile of skills and gives something to work on to build the areas of difficulty. It can build confidence in children who know they are struggling in some areas, by understanding where they have areas of higher skill levels. Sometimes parents or teachers will have a ‘feeling’ that a child is performing below the expected level for their age, but just can’t put their finger on why. Or they may feel that the child is not performing at the level of their own potential abilities, but without knowing what their abilities are or their current achievements in an age-related way, it isn’t possible for them to say this for certain. Ability and achievement assessments can help identify and confirm these issues, by providing assessment information on a child’s performance relative to age-related expectations and by comparing the child’s performance on ability assessments with achievement assessments.

Assessments for children use game-like and fun activities to measure skills . The abilities being measured are not all assessed by language – especially in younger children where language difficulties may make it hard for some children to demonstrate their skills in other aspects of their learning. Instead, other methods are used such as pointing to selected pictures, ink daubers, jigsaw pictures, and block cubes. The ideal is to work with children so that at the end of the assessment, I have lots of information about their skills across a range of areas, and they feel they’ve had a really fun time! More often than not, the children really enjoy the one to one time and return to their classroom full of stories about it, and are very happy when I return to see them again! Recently, I assessed a 12 year old boy in secondary school who kept telling me he was having such a good time and was really enjoying the activities.

It is massively important - this cannot be stressed more - to use modern assessments which gain as much information as possible, rather than older ones (developed from research that is now outdated) or abridged assessments where unusual scores would not be noticed. In-depth assessments can use various subtests within each area assessed which makes it clear if some scores are unusual or outliers.

There are some skills that are very important to assess, which are not always able to be easily spotted in a classroom environment, such as working memory, processing, working within time limits, spatial awareness, understanding of social situations, and being able define words. Other difficulties encountered within class, which may be noticed but misunderstood as to why, may be based on other difficulties that are not so easy to spot in the class, such as literacy difficulties or social difficulties being related to expressive and/or receptive language difficulties.

Tests aren’t perfect – that has to be accepted for any test. We know there are criticisms of all exams: SATs, GCSEs, A Levels. However, the assessments used by Educational Psychologists have been based on a huge level of research about the skills being measured and are trialled extensively in order to produce the norms that the scores are compared to. They are regularly updated with new research and changes to populations. For example, the WISC assessment (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) was originally developed in 1949! It is now in its 5 ^th edition (WISC-V), with several changes to scales, subtests and the organisation of them within different domains and addition ancillary evaluations of scores and statistical analyses. Some assessments are from the USA and based on the US population for determining what is an 'average' score, and where other scores lie. Sometimes US tests have to be used in the UK because there isn’t a UK equivalent, but fortunately there is a UK version of the WISC-V and the equivalent achievement assessment, the WIAT-III UK. It is important where possible to use UK versions of tests in the UK, because the standardisation information is gained from the UK population and based on the UK curriculum expectations (which is a huge process of testing a few thousand people on the new tests to see how different samples of the population perform).

What about change over time?

The design of ability assessments is such that the abilities being measured would fall into a range, and if re-assessed on many different days the same person’s score would fall within the same range 95% of the time (the confidence interval). A child’s scores can be influenced by motivation, attention, interests and opportunities for learning, as well as more basic needs such as tiredness, when they last had a break for play, and whether they ate breakfast that morning, and any distractions around them when they are assessed . A child’s scores could be slightly higher or lower if tested again on a different day, therefore scores are viewed as a snapshot of the child’s current level of intellectual functioning and a contribution to an understanding of the child’s current strengths and any needs that can be addressed. This is why it is important that scores are used amongst other information about the child: observation in class, observation of how they performed tasks on the assessment, examination of their class work, discussions with teachers and parents.

Some EP assessments are not designed to be repeated too quickly due to the possibility of practice effects. Assessment books are closely guarded, with severe copyright rules, and most have a time frame within which children shouldn’t be re-assessed (eg. 1 or 2 years). Some can be used more frequently, such as achievement tests which assess areas such as word reading, spelling, maths etc because it can be useful to investigate these more frequently to measure progress.

Some assessments are done by the adults that know a child well. For example, some aspects of communication – especially the pragmatic (social) use and understanding of language – are measured by questionnaires about the child’s communication answered by the adults. Several adults can complete the questionnaires and their answers can be combined in the scoring process, which gives more information and less chance of outlying scores affecting the results.

Who can do assessments?

A quick look on any assessment-selling website (such as Pearson or Ann Arbor) reveals quite literally hundreds of assessments measuring a variety of cognitive, language, achievement, emotional, social skills and more. Importantly, the people buying these assessments must prove their qualifications that enable them to buy and administer the assessments. They are categorised into A, B and C depending on the qualifications needed to use the assessments. A qualified Educational Psychologist can use assessments from all three categories. It is not just about being able to administer the assessments, but more importantly about being sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable about the scoring process and how to interpret what the assessment findings mean.

Days Spent Qualifying

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:18:27 GMT

The number of days it took to become a fully qualified Educational Psychologist.

Why is this important?

For clients to be certain they are getting the services of a fully qualified psychologist , the HCPC (Health & Care Professions Council) holds the register of appropriately qualified and experienced members. Anyone wanting to contact a psychologist can check the registration of the psychologist on the HCPC website. Practitioner psychologist job titles are protected by law : only people with the relevant qualifications can use them. These include Educational Psychologist, Clinical Psychologist, Forensic Psychologist amongst others.

However, there are unfortunately ways around this that unqualified people use to make it appear that they have similar qualifications, for example the word " psychologist " is not protected by itself, and there are less strict rules around the use of " psychology " within business names. This means that people who are not aware of these rules risk finding and using the services of an unqualified individual, which could be a waste of time and money, and even worse quite damaging.

It is a long process to become a properly qualified psychologist. Here's my #CountTheDays outline of what I did to become an HCPC registered Educational Psychologist ! This is not the route all EPs will have taken, but it shows how each of the stage of my qualifying route fed into the overall path to qualification.

��️ 5083 !!! is the number of days of my life I spent becoming a professionally qualified psychologist, and that’s not including all the years of experience gained after qualification!

Here’s how I got there (bear in mind some of these examples run concurrently):

�� It started with 2 years studying A Levels which would satisfy the entry requirements to gain a place on a psychology degree course at university.

�� It includes 3 years studying for my undergraduate psychology degree . Having a psychology degree doesn’t make you a psychologist ; the degree contains no work with clients, it is theory and research-based preparing future psychologists for client work.

�� It includes 1 year doing my Postgraduate degree in Forensic Psychology when I studied the theory of crime, law, justice, and victim support and did placements and research projects in prisons.

�� It includes 2 years working part time (to help fund the degree and masters) for Child Protection and the Learning Disabilities Team (adults), where I learned about team work in a large organisation, as well as the consequences and wide-ranging difficulties that children and families experience in child protection cases, whether it is abuse, neglect or other reasons for being a child in need, and how multiple agencies work together to support the child, family and school.

�� It includes 2 years working in various prisons with prisoners nearing the end of their sentence, providing training for qualifications as well as advice and guidance for preparation for employment. Here I learned about teaching and learning, as well as the negative effects of pupils being excluded from school, and the importance of early intervention. This has a big influence on my interests in the link between learning difficulties and exclusion from school, and my passion to assess learning to identify unmet learning needs .

�� It includes 2 years doing a PGCE (postgraduate certificate in education) which I did part-time whilst working in the prisons. This course gave me the knowledge and understanding of the theory of teaching and learning, lesson preparation, how different people learn and how to differentiate teaching methods and material. I completed assignments and was observed teaching on several occasions.

�� It includes 1 year working in a social care research and development team , where I used my psychology degree and masters research knowledge and techniques to design and evaluate research projects that influenced policy development in children’s and adults’ social care.

�� It includes 1 year working as an Assistant Psychologist in an Educational Psychology Service. I learned about educational assessments, building rapport with pupils, parents and teachers, designing individual support packages for pupils, and developing a research and training programme in collaboration with physiotherapists and occupational therapists. I may have had ‘psychologist’ in my job title but I still wasn’t a psychologist. I was assisting the work of qualified psychologists.

�� It includes 3 years as a trainee Educational Psychologist studying for a professional doctorate , a requirement to be a qualified Educational Psychologist and to be able to use the title. I learned about the theory and practice of educational assessments, visited numerous nurseries and schools including spending a week placement in every key stage, a month in one Educational Psychology Service in the first year, and then 2 full years of employment as a Trainee EP with another Educational Psychology Service. I received supervision and feedback about my clinical work with pupils, parents and teachers. I was still not yet a qualified psychologist.

�� Only then when I passed my placements, completed my assignments and dissertations, completed my research thesis and related viva was I eligible to register with the Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC) as a practitioner psychologist.

�� The title of ‘psychologist’ does not come easy. There are no shortcuts. It should be illegal to just 'call yourself a psychologist’ on social media. But it’s not.

�� Join in! Count the days! Whatever your profession, let me know in the comments on my Count The Days Facebook post www.facebook.com/1stClassLincs how many days it has taken you to become professionally qualified in your role or how many days so far if you’re not yet there! Perhaps you’re a psychologist , an accountant , a medic , a legal professional . Let’s normalise the hard work and honour the dedication it has taken for you to keep showing up day after day until you get there. Credit goes to Dr Marianne Trent (clinical psychologist) for starting this idea and highlighting the importance and dedication of properly qualified professionals.

#CountTheDays

What is an ability assessment? It's just IQ, right?!

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:19:51 GMT

As an Educational Psychologist, what do my assessments measure?

What do my assessments measure? I realise that a lot of people won’t know what I assess and why, and may think it’s just to find out “IQ” or ability – it’s not! As an Educational Psychologist (EP), I have completed over 6 years of training including a Doctorate. During that time, I have studied a lot of research and theories about how to measure children’s abilities and achievements, and gained a lot of knowledge about analysing assessment results. I have also worked within the Educational Psychology Services of local authorities for over 15 years.

EPs are often asked to assess a child’s learning or abilities, but what does that mean? I get numerous emails asking me to assess a young person, and often asking what the cost will be. I then have to go back to them and ask what it is they want to find out. There are hundreds of assessments, not just of learning, but also of language, communication, emotional skills, attainment levels, executive function, planning, attention, working memory, processing, development, self-concept…

IQ assessments are hardly ever used by EPs, and although assessments can be of ability, their purpose is to help teachers and parents find out more about where a child’s skills lie, and where they may have relative difficulties. From that information, school staff can use a child’s strengths to build their confidence, and help the child where they need it most. This helps break down barriers to learning and helps the child make the best progress. In my assessments, I don’t just look at the scores but also how the child worked in the assessment, what they found hard, what helped them learn or be successful if they didn’t know an answer or how to approach something. So it’s much more than just scores, it’s a lot about observation and processes.

Early IQ tests were very different to what is assessed today, and unfortunately the lack of information but keenness to identify learning difficulties often meant they were used to disadvantage some sectors of society including labelling some people as unfit for education. Sadly the negative connotations of these old IQ tests linger, but also many people have memories of old style IQ tests, of having a go at a Mensa type quiz, or the ones that are printed in magazines for a bit of fun. More modern theories of intelligence are much more varied, taking into account many different abilities and skills that individuals have. Many of these an IQ test cannot measure – eg. skills in music, crafts, sports, or interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence. This is why EPs would not use an ability assessment in isolation or as an overall measure of someone’s intelligence, but would try to gather as much information as possible about the individual child and their skills, from the child themselves and people who know them well, such as parents/carers and school teachers. An ability assessment can form a part of that information. EPs are also keen to find a young person’s strengths in whatever area they may be, as well as ascertain any difficulties in order to identify areas and strategies for support in school.

Ability and achievement tests are different. Ability assessments (also called cognitive assessments) measure underlying skills such as verbal comprehension, reasoning, logic, working memory and processing. Achievement assessments measure the pupil’s current level of attainment in skills that relate to the school curriculum, eg. numeracy, maths reasoning, reading comprehension, spelling and word reading. It is most useful when both assessments are used because they measure such different aspects of learning.

So next time you hear about an IQ test, question what it means! If you’re wanting an Educational Psychologist to assess your child or a child in your school, you’ll no doubt be asked for a bit more detail about what you want to find out so that the EP can consider which assessment(s) would be most appropriate.