Neuropsychological testing for kids at NSPT
A child receives a referral for neuropsychological testing when there are concerns about one or more areas of development. Certainly, these areas of concern can include cognition, academics, attention, memory, language, socialization, emotional regulation, behavioral concerns, motor difficulties, visual-spatial, and adaptive functioning. Testing can identify your child’s learning style and cognitive strengths. Lastly, through testing, our neuropsychologists can recommend accommodations to implement at school and at home.
What is a neuropsychological evaluation?
A neuropsychological evaluation aids the psychologist in determining a diagnosis.
Such as:
- Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
- Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Specific Learning Disorder
- Language Disorder
- Emotional and behavioral disorders
How do I know if my child needs a pediatric neuropsychological evaluation?
An evaluation is usually recommended if your child has a medical condition such as Down syndrome, epilepsy, or a traumatic brain injury (TBI). So, the goal of the evaluation is to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses. With this information, we can provide the right treatment recommendations, determine progress and response to intervention, and monitor functioning.
After your pediatrician has made a referral for a neuropsychological evaluation, you need to schedule an intake appointment. Typically, each intake appointment is one hour long.
Is my child eligible for testing at NSPT’s neuropsychological testing center?
Due to our growing team, we are able to test a larger population. Most noteworthy, we offer three types of testing services:
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- Early Childhood Developmental Assessment
This is a multidisciplinary approach where our team works with a speech therapist and occupation therapist to assess children ages 15 months to 3 years, 11 months with developmental concerns ranging from socialization, language, and motor development. Each of the 3 scheduled testing appointments are typically on separate days. - Neuropsychological Evaluation
NSPT’s standard neuropsychological evaluation for individuals ages 4 through college-age. - Adult ADHD assessment
This is a new service we are now offering to adults who are interested in an ADHD evaluation. Typically, this is a one-day, 4-hour evaluation.
- Early Childhood Developmental Assessment
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What should I expect during the neuropsychological intake?
- Your first appointment is centered around talking with the psychologist about your areas of concern. Therefore, you will be asked to do the following:
- Provide information about your child’s history.
- Including medical, developmental, academic, attention, behavior, motor, and social history.
- Inform the psychologist of any current, or past, services your child receives, such as:
- speech-language therapy
- occupational therapy
- physical therapy
- individual therapy
- academic tutoring
What to bring to the neuropsychological intake:
- You and your child
- Completed intake paperwork
- Similarly, any prior psychological/neuropsychological evaluation (if applicable)
- Your child’s most recent 504 Plan or IEP (if applicable)
- Additionally, any recent private intervention evaluation (e.g., speech-language therapy, occupational therapy)
- Certainly, don’t forget your child’s most recent report card or standardized exam scores
- Finally, any relevant medical information (e.g., EEG report, CT/MRI scan report)
Lastly, after the intake, you will schedule the testing session for your child. Most of the time, testing is completed in one day (5 hours of testing). Occasionally, the testing will be completed over two days. The psychologist will create a neuropsychological battery based on the areas of concern. However, the battery is subject to adjustment on the day of testing. Typically, this occurs if another area of concern arises during the testing session.
To sum up, a pediatric neuropsychological evaluation can also help to determine any appropriate therapies such as speech or Applied Behavior Analysis. For more FAQ, click here.
NSPT offers services in Bucktown, Evanston, Deerfield, Lincolnwood, Glenview, Lake Bluff, Des Plaines and Mequon! If you have questions or concerns about your child, we would love to help! Give us a call at (866) 815-6592 and speak to one of our Family Child Advocates!
Here’s What You Can Expect from a Neuropsychological Evaluation
A child may be referred for a neuropsychological evaluation when there are concerns about one or more areas of development. This can include cognition, academics, attention, memory, language, socialization, emotional, behavioral, motor, visual-spatial, and adaptive functioning. 
A neuropsychological evaluation aids the psychologist in determining an appropriate diagnosis, such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Language Disorder, and emotional and behavioral disorders. An evaluation can also be recommended if your child has been diagnosed with a medical condition such as Down syndrome, epilepsy, or a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The purpose of the evaluation would be to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses in order to provide appropriate treatment recommendations, determine progress and response to intervention, and monitor functioning.
After your pediatrician has made a referral for a neuropsychological evaluation, you will need to schedule an intake appointment, which is typically an hour long.
What to Expect During the Neuropsychological Intake:
- Inform the psychologist about your areas of concern
- Provide information about your child’s history
- Including medical, developmental, academic, attention, behavior, motor, and social history
- Inform the psychologist of any current, or past, services your child receives (e.g., speech language therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, individual therapy, academic tutoring)
What to Bring to the Neuropsychological Intake:
- Completed intake paperwork
- Any prior psychological/neuropsychological evaluation (if applicable)
- Your child’s most recent 504 Plan or IEP (if applicable)
- Any recent private intervention evaluation (e.g., speech language therapy, occupational therapy)
- Your child’s most recent report card or standardized exam scores
- Any relevant medical information (e.g., EEG report, CT/MRI scan report)
After the intake, you will schedule the testing session for your child. Most of the time, testing is completed in one day (5 hours of testing), but occasionally the testing will need to be completed over two days. The psychologist will create a neuropsychological battery based on the areas of concern; however, the battery could be adjusted on the day of testing. Typically, this occurs if another area of concern arises during the testing session.
What to Bring on the Day of the Neuropsychological Test:
- Plenty of snacks and lunch
- Completed paperwork and rating forms
- Any prior evaluations that were not brought to the intake
After testing is complete, you will return for a one hour feedback session approximately two weeks later, with the clinician to review the testing data, any diagnoses determined based on your child’s profile, recommendations for home and school, and any intervention services to foster your child’s development.
NSPT offers services in Bucktown, Evanston, Deerfield, Lincolnwood, Glenview, Lake Bluff, Des Plaines, Hinsdale and Mequon! If you have any questions or concerns about your child, we would love to help! Give us a call at (877) 486-4140!
Reasons to Seek a Neuropsychological Evaluation for Your Child
Neuropsychology is a field of psychology that focuses on the relationship between learning, behavior, and brain functioning. A child may be referred for a 
neuropsychological evaluation when there are concerns about one or more areas of their development. This can include a child’s cognitive, academic, memory, language, social, self-regulatory, emotional, behavioral, motor, visual-spatial, and adaptive functioning.
This type of evaluation can help rule out diagnoses such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Language Disorder, as well as various emotional and behavioral disorders. A neuropsychological evaluation can also be helpful if your child has been diagnosed with a medical condition such as Down Syndrome or other genetic disorders, Traumatic Brain Injury, or Epilepsy. The purpose of the evaluation is to identify a child’s patterns of strengths and challenges in order to provide parents, schools, and other providers with strategies to help them succeed across contexts. It can also be used to track a child’s progress and response to targeted interventions.
In order to assess whether a neuropsychological evaluation may be helpful for a child, a family may identify concerns in the following areas:
- Cognitive
- Difficulties with verbal and nonverbal reasoning and problem solving
- Requiring a significant amount of repetition and/or additional time when learning
- Delays in adaptive functioning
- Academic
- Grades below peers
- Concerns with reading (phonetic development, fluency, comprehension), mathematics (calculation, word problems), or writing (spelling, content, organization)
- Needing additional time to complete schoolwork, homework, or tests
- Frustration with academic work
- Language
- Expressive (output of language) or receptive (understanding of language) difficulties
- Challenges initiating or maintaining a conversation
- Difficulties with sarcasm or non-literal language (e.g, “It’s raining cats and dogs”)
- Repetitive or odd language usage (e.g., repeating lengthy scripts heard from television or news programs)
- Pronoun reversals or odd use of language
- Self-Regulation
- Difficulty paying attention or sitting still
- Needing frequent prompts or reminders to complete tasks
- Difficulty with multiple-step commands
- Losing or misplacing items
- Forgetting to turn in completed assignments
- Social
- Poor peer relations
- Inappropriate response when approached by peers
- Difficulty with imaginative, functional, or reciprocal play
- Limited interest in peers or preference for solitary play
- Repetitive Behaviors
- Repetitive vocalizations
- Repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand flapping, finger flicking, body rocking)
- Lining up toys, spinning wheels of cars, sorting objects for prolonged periods of time
- Behavioral Dysregulation
- Physical or verbal aggression
- Defiance or non-compliance
- Difficulties with transitions or changes in routine
- Self-injury (e.g., head banging)
- Emotional
- Poor frustration tolerance
- Irritability or easily upset
- Eating or sleeping difficulties
- Somatic complaints
- Negative self-statements
- Lack of interest in things he/she used to enjoy
- Visual-Spatial, Visual-Motor, and Motor
- Poor handwriting
- Trouble with fine motor tasks (e.g., unwrapping small items, buttoning or zipping clothing, tying shoe laces)
- Difficulty transferring information from the classroom board to a notepad, or transferring information from a test booklet to a scantron/bubble sheet
- Difficulty with overwhelming visual displays (e.g., computer screen with several icons; homework with several problems on one sheet; a book with several colors and pictures)
Should a child demonstrate difficulties in some of the areas listed above, he/she may benefit from further consultation or a subsequent neuropsychological evaluation. Through this process, areas of difficulty can be identified, and targeted interventions will be suggested to enhance a child’s development.
NSPT offers services in Bucktown, Evanston, Highland Park, Lincolnwood, Glenview, Lake Bluff and Des Plaines. If you have questions or concerns about your child, we would love to help! Give us a call at (877) 486-4140 and speak to one of our Family Child Advocates today!
What Should I Tell My Child About Neuropsychological Testing?
One question that I have parents asking me all the time about coming in for testing is this: “What do I tell my child?” There really is no universal answer to this question. The answer has to be based upon what the child can handle. How old is the child? What is the child’s cognitive functioning? Just to name a couple…
The goal is to speak to the child at a level that he or she can understand. It is important to not lie or cover up the reasons for the visit. Many times parents attend an intake session because of concerns regarding the child’s academic performance. It is important to be upfront with the child. Children are
quite intuitive and know a lot more than we often give them credit for. I would first have parents ask the child general questions (it is important to do this, even if they already know the answers since this serves to prime the child’s memory): any combination of the below questions might serve to help guide the child.
Questions to Ask Your Child Before a Neuropsychology Evaluation:
- “Do you like going to school?”
- “What is hard about school?”
- “Are you happy with your grades?”
- “Is it hard to listen and pay attention to the teacher?”
- “Does it bother you to have to play alone?”
Once the child admits to one or more of the questions, it is then appropriate to explain that the purpose of testing or therapy is to help address the specific issues and make school more enjoyable.
After the child understands the purpose for the testing or therapy, it is always important to explain to him or her what the actual session will look like. I always advise parents to ask the individual that will be working with your child lots of questions. Find out who will be doing the work, where will the work take place, how long would the child be there, are there breaks available, and what will the child actually be doing. The goal is that the child will be ready for testing or therapy and have a basic idea of what to expect.
Click here for a guide to understanding Neuropsychological Test Results.
NSPT offers services in Bucktown, Evanston, Highland Park, Lincolnwood, Glenview and Des Plaines. If you have questions or concerns about your child, we would love to help! Give us a call at (877) 486-4140 and speak to one of our Family Child Advocates today!
A Guide To Understanding Neuropsychological Test Results
When a child comes in for a neuropsychological evaluation, it can provide an opportunity to gain a larger picture of how he learns and if support is needed in and outside of the classroom. The results from the evaluation can then help parents and teachers alike to better support the child’s learning. After a day of testing, there are a lot of numbers and verbiage that may seem overwhelming and difficult to understand… what does it all mean?! Here is a guide to understanding these sometimes complex neuropsychological test results.
Most psychological tests are reported with standard scores and percentiles. This number is representative of how the child scored in comparison to a representative sample of same-age peers. This group is the “norm” group.
Standard Scores
Standard Score: Based on scale with the average score of 100.
“Typical” limits of functioning:
- Above Average: 110-119
- Average is considered: 90-109
- Low Average: 80-89
68% of the general population will perform within these limits
There are generally many small tests (subtests) that make up a larger area of functioning like Working Memory (aka short-term memory), for example. When the scores of all the subtests are combined you get a composite score, which is reported as a Standard Score. These composite scores tend to be a little more reliable than the individual scores on their own…
Why may you ask? Attention, fine motor skills, alertness, distractibility, anxiety, etc. can all play a role in a child’s performance.
All of these observations are taken into account when interpreting the child’s results.
Percentiles
Percentiles: These often go hand in hand with the standard scores. If a child earned a standard score of 100, then they performed at the 50th percentile. If you took stats, this may ring a bell, if not, here’s another way to think about it..
-“Danny did as well or better than 50% of the his same-age peers”
Typical areas looked at during an evaluation:
Your child’s cognitive functioning =
- Memory
- Verbal Comprehension
- Fluid Reasoning: ability to think logically & problem solve in new situations
- Visual Spatial skills: ability to visualize things in your head
- Processing Speed: how quickly a child can perform on an “easy” or over-learned activity
Your child’s academic functioning =
- Reading
- Writing
- Math
If the child has attention, language, social or emotional concerns, different types of tests are administered to supplement the evaluation and is tailored to the parents’ concerns and child’s needs.
NSPT offers services in Bucktown, Evanston, Highland Park, Lincolnwood, Glenview and Des Plaines. If you have questions or concerns about your child, we would love to help! Give us a call at (877) 486-4140 and speak to one of our Family Child Advocates today!
Neuropsychological Aspects of Diabetes
Diabetes is an autoimmune disorder associated with an inability of the affected person’s/child’s pancreas to secrete insulin. There are two types of diabetes (type I and type II). Read on to understand the neuropsychological aspects of Diabetes.
Type I Diabetes:
Type I diabetes is considered to be insulin dependent in which the child must take insulin injections, as there is a complete inability for the body to produce insulin. Type I Diabetes is associated with unusual thirst, excessive urination, rapid unexplained weight loss, and overwhelming fatigue. This is one of the most prevalent chronic childhood diseases with approximately 29,000 new cases diagnosed each year. The peak incidence rate of type diabetes is between 10 and 14 years of age.
Type II Diabetes:
Type II diabetes is considered to be non-insulin dependent and is rarely signaled by a clinically obvious medical crisis. Type II is most common in individuals who are over forty years old and whose body mass index is greater than 25 (considered overweight). This is a fairly common condition in that there are approximately 600,000 new cases identified each year.
Neuropsychological Aspects of Diabetes:
Research has indicated that age of onset of diabetes is a critical factor in secondary cognitive impact. What this means is that children who have been diagnosed with diabetes in the first four to six years of age are more prone to significantly lower cognitive scores. This is also found to be true with concerns with attentional regulation. In general, children and adolescents with a diagnosis of diabetes are not more prone for a diagnosis of ADHD; however, if the child had been diagnosed with diabetes early in life, they are more likely to exhibit symptoms of ADHD.
Children and adolescents with late onset diagnosis of diabetes are more prone to concerns with verbal cognitive functioning and academic achievement in comparison to a control group of non-diabetic children and adolescents.
Overall, diabetes can be a pretty well-controlled disorder. If children and adolescents control their insulin levels, they tend to not demonstrate more neurocognitive concerns than their non-diabetic peers.
Click here to learn more about our Neuropsychology Diagnostic and Testing Center!
What to Expect After Neuropsychological Testing
The process of going through a neuropsychological evaluation can be tiring and time consuming. This process is long-starting from
concerns brought up by the teacher, sharing the information with the pediatrician, getting a referral, meeting with the neuropsychologist, having the child participate in the comprehensive evaluation, and meeting at the end for feedback. This process may take weeks or months to fully complete.
concerns brought up by the teacher, sharing the information with the pediatrician, getting a referral, meeting with the neuropsychologist, having the child participate in the comprehensive evaluation, and meeting at the end for feedback. This process may take weeks or months to fully complete.It is important to understand that the neuropsychological evaluation is really the start of the process.
The focus of the evaluation is to provide information and diagnostic clarification about what is going on with a child’s behavior or learning. Once the evaluation is completed, the entire process of help and change begins. Read more
How Can a Neuropsychological Evaluation Help My Child?
A neuropsychological evaluation can help a child in multiple ways. The focus of the evaluation is to provide information for parents about why a child is struggling with regards to his or her academic achievement, social engagement, and/or emotional regulation. Parents will bring their children in for a neuropsychological evaluation when they have concerns about their performance in any of the above domains.
What is the goal of a neuropsychological evaluation?
The goal of the evaluation is to provide diagnostic clarification based upon a set of symptoms that the child exhibits. This information is attained through the following ways:
- Parental interview
- Parental and teacher report
- Behavioral observation Read more
What is a Pediatric Neuropsychologist?
Pediatric neuropsychologists are clinical psychologists who focus on completing comprehensive evaluations to ascertain the most appropriate diagnosis in order to lead to the most effective treatment outcome. All neuropsychologists have their Ph.D. or Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology and also have several years of training with brain based behaviors, neurodevelopmental conditions, as well as effective interventions and accommodations.
The typical questions that parents will bring forth in a neuropsychology clinic are related to the child’s academic performance, behavioral regulation, social interaction, and/or emotional functioning. It is the goal of the neuropsychologist to help identify what is causing the negative behavior and what would be an effective course of action.
Conditions and diagnoses that pediatric neuropsychologists often work with include the following:
- Learning Disabilities
- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
- Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Anxiety Disorder
- Mood Disorders
Often, it is found that a child may have multiple conditions. One of the goals of the neuropsychologist is to help determine what the main condition(s) to address are and the most effective interventions.
The interventions that are determined by a pediatric neuropsychologist are often found in the following places:
- School Setting
- Home environment Read more