Psychological Assessment with Children: Understanding Learning, Emotion and Context
Over brunch recently, a friend and I started talking about psychological assessment. I will call them Sam here. Sam is neurodivergent and spoke about what it had been like growing up as a neurodivergent child in school, long before they had the language to make sense of some of those experiences.
Later in life, receiving a diagnosis helped give some of those experiences a name. But the process itself was not always comfortable. Sam described encounters with clinicians where the relationship felt strongly hierarchical: the clinician appeared to hold the knowledge and authority, while the person being assessed was expected to receive the diagnosis and follow recommendations about what should happen next.
“I wanted them to co-create the whole decision-making process with me for my own treatment,” Sam said.
My work has involved psychological and developmental assessment with children and families in schools, clinics, and preschool screening settings, including children with ADHD and different learning profiles. Assessment rarely ends with administering tests. Much of its value comes later, when we sit with children, parents, and teachers and try to understand what the findings actually mean in everyday life.
The conversation brought me back to a question that increasingly shapes how I approach this work:
Who is the assessment for, and whose knowledge counts within it?
Assessment with a child, not simply of a child.
Psychologists bring developmental knowledge, psychometrics, diagnostic frameworks, and clinical judgement to an assessment.
But professional expertise is only one form of knowledge in the room.
A child may never use terms such as working memory, processing speed, or emotional regulation. Yet they may tell us that they lose track halfway through a long instruction, that explaining an answer aloud is easier than getting it onto paper, or that they concentrate well in one class but struggle in another.
Sometimes children tell us that everybody thinks they are not trying.
That information matters.
A comprehensive assessment therefore needs more than test scores. Developmental history, observations, academic information, and parent and teacher reports all contribute to the picture, alongside the young person's own perspective.
Children, parents, and teachers do not always describe the same difficulty in the same way. Rather than assuming that one account must be correct, those differences can help us understand how a child's experience changes across home, school, relationships, and other settings (De Los Reyes et al., 2015).
This was also evident in earlier research with young people with ADHD and anxiety, where parent and child reports did not always identify difficulties in the same way (M Shoorcheh, 2019).
What we believe about children shapes assessment
The assumptions adults hold about children influence the roles we take in relation to them.
Murris (2018), writing critically about childhood and education, describes several recurring ways children have been constructed in Western developmental thinking, including as developing, ignorant, innocent, egocentric, fragile, or in need of correction. These are not descriptions of individual children, but broader assumptions about childhood that can influence how adults understand children and the roles they take in relation to them.
Across these different constructions, the child is often positioned as lacking something: maturity, rationality or experience, responsibility, social understanding, or resilience. Adults may then position themselves as the people who must provide what is missing through guidance, instruction, discipline, protection, socialisation, diagnosis, or remediation.
This matters for psychological assessment too.
If a child is mainly understood as someone adults need to explain, correct, protect, or manage, assessment can easily become something we do to them. If we recognise children as developing people who are already observing and interpreting their own experiences, there is more room for assessment to become something we do with them.
This does not mean abandoning clinical judgement or expecting children to take on adult
responsibility. It means recognising that professional knowledge and a child's knowledge of their own experience can offer different and valuable information.
Collaborative approaches to assessment have supported this perspective for many years
(Tharinger et al., 2008), and more recent neurodiversity-affirming models similarly emphasise developing understanding with the person being assessed, rather than only about them (Woods et al., 2025).
This becomes particularly important during feedback. A child should not spend hours being interviewed, observed, and tested only to disappear when everyone begins discussing what the results mean.
Beyond the IQ number
Cognitive testing can give us useful information. But there is an important difference between asking:
What is this child's IQ?
and asking:
What does this assessment help us understand about how this child learns?
A Full-Scale IQ combines performance across several tasks into a summary score. It can be
informative, but two children with the same overall score may have very different learning
experiences and support needs.
Moving away from a single IQ number also does not mean that every difference between cognitive scores should be given diagnostic significance. Research on tests such as the WISC has cautioned against over-interpreting patterns of highs and lows as though they provide a complete explanation of a child's difficulties (de Jong, 2023).
So a learning profile is understood as something broader than the shape of a test graph.
It includes how a child takes in information, holds it in mind, communicates what they know, manages attention and emotion, responds to different environments, and experiences learning themselves.
In practice, cognitive findings are considered alongside observations made during the assessment, what teachers see at school, what parents notice at home, what academic measures show us, and what the child says about their own experience.
When giving feedback, I often use visual material to make this easier to understand. This may include different components of a cognitive assessment such as the WISC alongside
questionnaires such as the Conners scales, bringing together parent, teacher, and self report where appropriate.
The scores tell us how performance compares with that of others of a similar age, but the
conversation needs to go further.
A child may reason very well but need considerably more time to produce written work. Another may work comfortably in a quiet one-to-one assessment but struggle to organise attention in a busy classroom.
The language also changes depending on who is in the room. Talking with a ten-year-old about their learning profile is different from discussing statistical findings with parents or teachers.
Feedback should not simply be the moment conclusions are delivered. Questions from children and families can contribute to how findings are understood and, where possible, recommendations can be discussed together before the report is finalised.
The score is part of the information. The context helps us understand what to do with it.
Emotion is part of learning too
Learning does not happen independently of emotion.
Emotional regulation is shaped by many parts of a child's experience at once. Attention, language, problem-solving, self-awareness, motivation, physical wellbeing, impulse control, and relationships can all affect how manageable a situation feels.
A child may understand a concept very well but struggle to show what they know when they are anxious, overwhelmed, tired, or managing several demands at once. A student who works comfortably one-to-one may find the same task much harder alongside classroom noise, time pressure, peer comparison, and anxiety about making a mistake.
Looking at emotion alongside cognition and context can help explain why performance may vary considerably across situations.
It is also one reason I am cautious when a single score or difficulty is used to explain the whole child.
Diagnosis can be useful without becoming the whole story
For many families, a diagnosis of ADHD, autism, or a specific learning disorder can help organise years of confusing experiences. It can provide access to support and give children and parents language for experiences that may previously have been interpreted as laziness, failure, or lack of effort.
I have seen moments during feedback when something changes in the room.
A parent may have spent years wondering why their child manages something one day and struggles with it the next. A young person may have repeatedly heard that they are bright but careless, capable but unmotivated, or simply not trying hard enough.
When the different pieces begin to make sense together, there can be a visible sense of
recognition. Once, at the end of a feedback meeting, a parent simply said:
“Such a relief.”
That stayed with me.
Sometimes the most useful change is in the question we begin asking. Instead of:
Why can't this child just do it?
we can ask:
What is making this difficult, and what would make it more possible?
A diagnosis becomes less useful when it starts replacing the individual.
A neurodiversity-informed perspective can help because it considers both the person and the environment in which their characteristics are expressed. Dwyer (2022), for example, emphasises strengths, difficulties, and context rather than viewing neurodivergence only through an individual deficit lens.
This does not mean denying disability or difficulty. Some children experience significant challenges with attention, communication, learning, or emotional regulation. A strengths-based assessment should still describe those difficulties clearly.
Nor does every difference need to become a superpower.
The aim is to recognise differences without allowing them to become the definition of the child. Neurodiversity-affirming approaches also ask us to consider how findings are communicated: whether reports are understandable, whether children and families recognise their experiences in what has been written, and whether recommendations make sense in everyday life (Angoff, 2024; Woods et al., 2025).
Assessment also has limits. Findings tell us something meaningful about a child at a particular developmental stage and in particular circumstances. They can guide what happens next without becoming a fixed prediction of who that young person will become (Wilson, 2026).
What should a family leave knowing?
By the end of an assessment, a family should have more than a diagnosis and a collection of scores.
They should have a clearer understanding of what learning is like for this particular child: where things come more easily, where they become effortful, what makes things harder, and what may help.
For schools, this can translate into practical changes: giving less information at once, providing visual as well as verbal instructions, allowing additional processing time, or reconsidering how a student demonstrates what they know.
Sometimes the environment itself needs adjusting.
Inclusive education cannot simply mean placing different learners in the same classroom and expecting everybody to adapt in the same way.
Sometimes assessment identifies something the child needs help developing. Sometimes it shows us something the adults or the environment need to change.
Often it is both.
The same principle applies at home. Telling parents that their child has difficulty regulating
emotions is not particularly useful unless we also consider when those difficulties arise, what contributes to them, and what adult responses may help. Approaches combining warmth, appropriate boundaries, and support for the gradual development of self-regulation can be useful here (Nelsen, 2006).
The report is not the end of the assessment
Perhaps this is what stayed with me after brunch with Sam.
Assessment works best when different forms of knowledge can meet.
Parents know their child's history. Teachers see the child learning within the complexity of a classroom. Psychologists can interpret developmental and psychometric information. And children know what it feels like to move through all of those environments themselves.
For me, comprehensive assessment is an attempt to bring those perspectives into conversation. Sometimes that leads to a diagnosis. Sometimes it clarifies a learning difficulty. Sometimes it helps explain why a child can perform well under one set of conditions and struggle under another.
The adults around the child can leave with a more accurate understanding of how that child learns. And, as far as their age and development allow, children can also leave understanding something useful about themselves.
That is when assessment begins to make a difference beyond the report.
Note: This article is intended for general information and reflection. It does not replace individual
psychological, medical, or educational assessment or advice.
References and Further Reading
Angoff, L. (2024). 4 Parts to Neurodiversity-Affirming Assessment. Explaining Brains.
De Los Reyes, A., Augenstein, T. M., Wang, M., Thomas, S. A., Drabick, D. A. G., Burgers, D. E., & Rabinowitz, J. (2015). The validity of the multi-informant approach to assessing child and adolescent mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 858–900. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038498
de Jong, P. F. (2023). The validity of WISC-V profiles of strengths and weaknesses. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 41(4), 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/07342829221150868
Dwyer, P. (2022). The neurodiversity approach(es): What are they and what do they mean for researchers? Human Development, 66(2), 73–92. https://doi.org/10.1159/000523723
M Shoorcheh, E. (2019). Examination of key clinical, biological, psychological and social factors associated with post-pubertal anxiety in young people diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Melbourne].
Murris, K. (2018). Posthuman child and the diffractive teacher: Decolonizing the nature/culture binary. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al. (Eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_7-2
Nelsen, J. (2006). Positive Discipline: The classic guide to helping children develop self-discipline, responsibility, cooperation, and problem-solving skills. Ballantine Books.
Tharinger, D. J., Finn, S. E., Hersh, B., Wilkinson, A., Christopher, G. B., & Tran, A. (2008).
Assessment feedback with parents and preadolescent children: A collaborative approach.
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 39(6), 600–609.
Wilson, K. (2026). What an Assessment Can and Cannot Tell You (Episode 264). Diverse
Thinking, Different Learning Podcast.
Woods, S. E. O., Brook, A., & Angoff, L. (2025). Principles of neurodiversity-affirming collaborative
assessment. Neurodiversity, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330251342069
