For Parents Bringing Their Children for Assessment for School-Related and Other Difficulties

•	Each child who has a learning disability needs a detailed description of his or her specific problem to enable teachers and other professionals to ensure that the child receives proper care and services.
•	What’s critical is to zero in on the different factors that might be contributing to a child’s inability to learn. These might include cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors, alone or in combination.
•	There are different kinds of reading and writing disabilities. Attentional disorders can take various forms. All require different remediation, accommodation and treatment.
•	For example, one child’s language skills might be impaired because he or she is bilingual and must manage the differences between two languages, while another child might have a language-based disability.
•	An examiner must make a differential diagnosis between ADHD and attention-related deficits due to other sources. These factors include, among others, environmental stressors, language deficits that impede understanding, gaps in educational skills, underlying anger and depression, sleep disorders and other medical or psychiatric problems.
•	The clinical interview plus the various assessment tools employed enable a clinician to make a focused diagnosis and specific recommendations for remediation.

A proper evaluation can save time, money and emotional stress

•	An evaluation might eliminate unnecessary tutoring expense (if a child, for example, doesn't have a reading or math issue but rather has ADHD).
•	Conversely, an evaluation might show that a child who is being medicated for ADHD doesn’t actually have the disorder and might need less-drastic intervention.
•	An evaluation might show that a child with behavior problems who is receiving expensive therapy need might simply learning-disability intervention or a change in educational placement.