Assessment Battery – Children
Adults living and working with children often want some quantitative measures to help them plan interventions and track progress. Typically psychologists are the ones who end up administering and interpreting the tests that are conducted. For example, a standard assessment battery, might involve using a measure for personality, another for how the child manages stress and emotions and an intelligence test. Assessment batteries are designed to try to give as full a picture as possible so that the best intervention can be designed.
These are all fine and have a long history of being very useful in helping children who have a long standing need get the help they should have. However there is now another way of looking at assessment. And that is to look at it from the point of view of positivity and strengths, rather than need and deficit. In this way baselining tools can be used to determine the number of strengths an individual holds – or indeed, a class holds. This way a school can work very holistically with all children and have a clear policy of strengthening strengths before they tackle needs. Having had a period of concentration on strengths where the child or the group has experienced many ‘wins’ and successes in their learning or their social and emotional management will mean that other areas where they find a learning process much harder to do will be more amenable to change later. It does not mean they will take much longer to catch up – once they have experienced successes the learning processes are strengthened in every way and so catch up is quicker.
Looking at assessment in this way takes us away from the idea of administering a battery of tests to assess deficit and towards the use of a portfolio of tools to measure and celebrate strengths and concepts that are of particular interest to a school such as optimism, persistence, motivation…. This way children can be given praise easily and realistically as they use strengths they already have to do new learning. The battery of tests can then be saved for children who have more worrying mental health problems or more defined syndromes of problematic processing. They can be used by the psychologists with their specialist knowledge. The portfolio of strengths based tools can be used by school and unit staff making it much faster and economical to support many more children who fall into the mid zone of the bell curve and tend to just under-perform and not reach their potential but who are not florid enough in their difficulties to attract the attention of specialists. Wouldn’t it be nice to give that group of children a real boost through this approach?
If you want to know more about a strengths based and developmental approach to behaviour change and find out more about behavior assessments for children, assessment battery children, young people, or adults.
Ann Henshall is a psychologist and expert of the Psychology of Behaviour and Positive Attitude Change in children and staff groups. She works with a team of expert professionals in mental health and wellbeing and spends many hours each week helping clients’ develop, baseline, track, assess, evaluate and monitor their support for learning programmes and strengthen the organisation to promote wellbeing. Find out more on http://www.thesoftstuff.net and join the community of likeminded people using strengths based approaches.