Full Developmental Assessments
Our comprehensive developmental assessments provide a clear diagnosis and help create individualized treatment plans for your child.
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An Expert Assessment for a Strong Start.
Our Thorough Process Ensures a Confident Diagnosis and Plan.
Our assessment process helps us construct individually-tailored treatment plans. As such, we may take a multi-faceted approach to assessment that could look different for each child. Assessments take place both during the initial intake process and throughout treatment. Ranging from brief 30-60 minute interviews and observations to comprehensive evaluations that address every facet of a child’s skill deficits and problem behaviors, evaluations can include some or all of the following components:
1
Semi-Structured Interview and Self-Reporting
Direct interviews with parents, caretakers, and patients help us understand the overall situation and identify important goals.
2
Observation
As behavior analysts, we treat behaviors that are observable and measurable. We observe our patients in various environments to understand triggers and environmental behavior catalysts.
3
Functional Interview
Our functional interviews of family members, teachers, and caregivers helps us identify cause and effect, as well as subsequent responses of certain behaviors which we need to address.
4
Functional Analysis
Functional analysis is the strategic and systematic process of altering the environment to turn problem behaviors on and off, observing environmental contingencies that can make a big difference for your child.
5
Treatment Analysis
Our function-based treatment package is developed, tested, evaluated, and optimized to ensure positive results, then shared with caregivers to implement the intervention long-term.
Developing a Custom Treatment Plan.
A Thorough Assessment Enables Your Most Effective Treatment.
Using the information we gather through various assessments, we develop a thorough and comprehensive treatment plan that explicitly details goals for behavioral excesses and deficits. This plan includes prevention strategies, teaching procedures, consequence strategies, data collection, and generalization goals. We review each patient’s individualized treatment plan with his or her family in order to ensure families are able to actively participate in the treatment process. Additionally, we train parents, teachers, and other caregivers to implement these procedures to ensure global and lasting change. Training caregivers and direct-care staff to implement treatment plans in a competent, safe, and effective manner is paramount.
Frequently Asked Questions
A full developmental assessment is a thorough evaluation that looks at your child’s growth and abilities across multiple areas. You can think of it as a snapshot of your child’s development at a certain point in time compared to typical milestones for kids their age. These assessments help us spot any delays or differences and guide us in creating support and treatment plans that are just right for your child.
Our assessments cover five key areas to give a complete picture of your child’s development:
- Physical Development: We look at both gross motor skills like running or jumping and fine motor skills like grasping objects or writing.
- Cognitive Development: We assess problem-solving, memory, learning abilities and how your child understands and thinks about the world.
- Language and Communication: We check how your child understands and uses verbal and nonverbal communication including speaking, listening and expressing themselves.
- Social and Emotional Development: We watch how your child interacts with others, handles emotions, builds relationships and navigates social situations.
- Adaptive Skills: We look at everyday skills like dressing, feeding and personal hygiene.
We use developmental milestones, which are skills most kids achieve by a certain age, to guide us in seeing how your child is doing and where extra support could help.
At Scottsdale PBS we combine several methods to get a full picture of your child’s abilities. This includes standardized tests, direct observations and interviews with you and other caregivers. Using research-backed tools helps make sure our assessments are accurate and reliable.
Some of the tools we may use include:
- BASC (Behavior Assessment System for Children): Measures behavior, emotions and social functioning at home and school
- Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales: Done through caregiver interviews to check communication, daily living skills and socialization
- WPPSI (Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence): Assesses cognitive skills and highlights strengths like visual-spatial reasoning and working memory
- NEPSY-II (Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment): Looks at attention, executive function and language processing to understand learning and behavior
The tools we use depend on your child’s age, the concerns we’re looking at and what will give us the clearest picture of their needs. This works together with our behavior-focused functional assessments to give a complete understanding.
No. Developmental screenings are quick, initial checks that spot kids who might be at risk for delays. They’re not detailed enough to diagnose or guide a full plan.
Our comprehensive assessments go much further. If a screening shows a possible delay, we use standardized tools along with behavioral analysis to confirm a diagnosis and create a personalized plan. We take your child’s environment, background and unique experiences into account, not just test scores. This way we can build the best plan to help your child grow and succeed.
