Assessment
What is it?
The purpose of an assessment is to build an accurate picture of an individual’s strengths and challenges. This could include cognitive strengths and weaknesses, exploring possible learning difficulties, examining intellectual giftedness, diagnosing a particular neurodevelopmental or mental health condition, or gaining a deeper awareness into personality style and traits. From this information, we are able to provide specific recommendations which are tailored to the individual. This can range from environmental adaptations such as extra time in exams, activities you can practice at home to improve upon a skill such as brain training, or specific recommendations for psychological therapy.
Who needs it?
Whether you’re struggling with a particular difficulty, or you simply want to deepen your self-awareness, an assessment enables you to gain a more accurate and detailed account of your individual functioning within a particular area. Our specialist assessment team provides a range of standardized assessment options across the lifespan for adults, children and adolescents.
Every assessment at ACPP is carefully tailored to the individual and their particular needs. Please see below for further information about the various types of assessments we offer for Adults.
Types of Assessments for Adults
- Intellectual Functioning Assessment
- Diagnostic Assessment
- Emotional Functioning/ Personality Assessment
Intellectual Functioning Assessment
We are increasingly interested in assessing our bodies - smartwatches measure our heart rate and fitness levels, providing us feedback on our physical state. However, we often overlook our brains. Our intellectual functioning impacts every aspect of our lives, from learning and working, to socializing and engaging in our favorite hobbies. Comprehensive IQ testing will shine a light on how your brain functions, highlighting strengths and weaknesses.
Following your IQ test, a licensed psychologist will talk you through the results providing you with a 360 overview of your intellectual functioning. You will receive a written report with a summary and actionable recommendations. With this knowledge, you will have the ability to understand and reflect upon yourself better, showing you areas to focus on developing and how to play to your strengths. Self- understanding is a powerful tool.
Diagnostic Assessment
If you find a particular area challenging such as: concentration, inattention, difficulties with reading, writing or numbers, memory problems or social communication difficulties, then a diagnostic assessment may be useful.
This is a detailed clinical evaluation to determine whether an individual meets the criteria for a particular diagnosis. From this information, we can generate appropriate treatment recommendations, such as whether medication may be helpful to treat the individual’s symptoms and for young adults in college or university, whether they may be entitled to extra time during exams and/or additional learning support.
Common concerns for diagnostic assessment include:
- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
- Intellectual Disability or previously undiagnosed Specific Learning Disorders in
- Reading, Writing and Math
- Memory difficulties including Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Mental Health Difficulties (such as anxiety or depression)
Our diagnostic assessments always include the following three areas at a minimum:
- IQ testing (intellectual functioning)
- Achievement abilities (reading, writing and math)
- Emotional functioning
Depending on the nature of the difficulties, further assessment tools may be administered in the following areas:
- Attention functioning
- Executive functioning (ability to plan, organize, sustain attention and inhibit responses)
- Memory functioning
- Personality testing
Emotional Functioning/Personality Assessment
If you are interested in learning more about your emotional, social and behavioral functioning, we offer a range of specialist psychological assessments designed to measure these aspects of an individual’s abilities. Sometimes these assessments are completed by those who simply want to understand themselves better, or as a method to understand a particular difficulty in more detail and to generate treatment recommendations.
We have access to the latest empirically supported measures of personality and emotional, social and behavioral functioning for both adults and children.
Common requests for assessments:
- Mental Health Assessment (including anxiety, mood, psychotic features, eating and personality disorders)
- Personality Assessment
- Challenging behavior (including conduct problems and sexualized behavior)