Professional supervision
Professional supervision is available for psychology trainees, neuropsychology and clinical psychology registrars, and established clinicians. Supervision provides a psychologically safe space to develop clinical competence and engage in reflective practice.
Intellectual Functioning: Verbal and Visual Processing Skills
A child’s intellectual abilities include both verbal skills and visual-spatial reasoning, which play key roles in how they learn and understand the world. Verbal skills involve using language to comprehend and express ideas, including vocabulary and the ability to think through abstract concepts. Difficulties with verbal skills can make tasks like reading, writing, and word-based math challenging.
Visual-spatial skills refer to how children interpret and work with visual information—such as recognising shapes, understanding spatial relationships, and solving puzzles or patterns. These skills are important for many classroom activities and daily tasks, like navigating spaces or working with hands-on materials.
Evaluating these areas provides valuable insight into a child’s learning profile, helping to identify their strengths and areas where extra support is needed. This information is crucial for designing targeted strategies and can also assist families in accessing support through government and school programs, including the NDIS and disability support funding.
Attention processes and working memory
Attention and working memory are closely linked cognitive functions that play a crucial role in a child’s ability to learn and engage with their environment. Attention allows a child to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions. This includes different types of attention such as focusing on one task, dividing attention between activities, and sustaining concentration over time. When attention is disrupted, a child may become easily distracted, lose their train of thought, or struggle to follow instructions, impacting their ability to process and learn new information.
Working memory builds on attention and involves not just holding information briefly, but also actively manipulating and integrating it with previously learned knowledge. For example, remembering a sequence of instructions while performing a task requires working memory. Because working memory relies heavily on sustained attention, if a child’s focus is interrupted, important information can be lost.
Children with difficulties in working memory often become overwhelmed when handling multiple pieces of information at once. They may find it hard to follow multi-step instructions, plan tasks, participate in group discussions, or complete assignments, as their working memory capacity is quickly exceeded. These challenges can lead to gaps in learning and delays in academic progress.
Assessment of attention and working memory is a key part of neuropsychological evaluations. When attention or working memory difficulties are identified, practical strategies can be recommended to support the child both at school and at home, helping to reduce cognitive load and improve their ability to concentrate ultimately enhancing their academic and everyday success.
Language development
Language is a complex system that supports learning, communication, and social connection. It is made up of several interconnected yet distinct abilities, including receptive, expressive, and pragmatic skills.
Difficulties with receptive language can impact a child’s ability to understand spoken or written information, follow instructions, or grasp classroom content. These challenges can sometimes underpin a child’s presentation of inattentiveness or disengagement, particularly in structured learning environments.
Expressive language difficulties affect a child’s ability to clearly communicate their thoughts and ideas. This may lead to frustration, reduced classroom participation, or challenges completing both spoken and written tasks.
Pragmatic language refers to the social use of language; understanding conversational rules, interpreting tone and body language, and adjusting language to different settings. Children with pragmatic language difficulties may struggle to initiate or maintain peer relationships and navigate social interactions appropriately.
Given the foundational role language plays in learning and social development, assessment of these skills is a key part of a comprehensive neurodevelopmental evaluation. Identifying strengths and areas of difficulty in language can guide recommendations to support communication, learning, and wellbeing.
Executive Functioning: Managing Thinking and Behaviour
Cognitive assessments provide valuable insights into a child’s thinking, learning, and behaviour. Parents, educators, or health professionals may seek an assessment for a variety of reasons, including the following:
Executive Functioning: Key Skills for Learning and Life
Executive functioning encompasses a set of higher-order cognitive processes that are essential for managing daily tasks, learning, and social interactions. These skills develop throughout childhood and adolescence, shaping a child’s ability to plan, organise, initiate activities, regulate emotions, and adapt flexibly to changing demands.
Core Components of Executive Functioning
Key components of executive functioning include planning and organisation (e.g., setting goals, sequencing steps), inhibitory control (the ability to resist impulses), cognitive flexibility (shifting between tasks or ideas), working memory (holding and manipulating information), and self-monitoring (evaluating one’s own performance and adjusting behaviour accordingly). Together, these skills support problem-solving, emotional regulation, and the ability to sustain effort on challenging tasks.
Challenges of Executive Functioning Difficulties
Children with executive functioning difficulties often struggle to initiate or complete multi-step assignments, manage time effectively, or switch between activities smoothly. They may forget instructions, misplace belongings, or appear disorganised. Emotionally, they can find it hard to control frustration or adapt when plans change, leading to behavioural challenges or withdrawal from tasks perceived as overwhelming.
Impact of Executive Functioning on Learning and Social Skills
In the classroom, weak executive skills can hinder a child’s ability to learn efficiently, impacting note-taking, task completion, study habits, and overall academic progress. These difficulties can also affect social interactions, as managing impulses and responding flexibly are critical to peer relationships.
Assessing Executive Functioning Skills
Assessment of executive functioning as part of a neuropsychological evaluation involves a combination of performance-based tasks, real-world observations, and reports from parents and teachers. This comprehensive approach helps identify specific executive strengths and challenges, revealing how these skills influence academic performance, behaviour, and daily functioning.
Supporting Executive Functioning for Better Outcomes
Understanding a child’s executive profile enables targeted recommendations to build effective organisational systems, enhance emotional regulation, and develop flexible thinking strategies. Early identification and support can empower children to better manage their cognitive resources, improve learning outcomes, and navigate everyday life with greater confidence.
Memory and New Learning
The ability to learn and retain new information is a complex process involving several stages. Initially, we take in (or encode) information by focusing our attention on relevant details. That information is then organised and connected to what we already know, allowing it to be stored in long-term memory. Successful retrieval of information later on depends on how well it was encoded, stored, and integrated with existing knowledge.
Children who struggle with learning and memory may appear forgetful, lose track of tasks or conversations, misplace belongings, or frequently need reminders and repetition to acquire new skills. They may have difficulty recalling facts independently, retrieving specific words, or keeping up with the pace of classroom learning without ongoing support.
As memory function is a complex higher order cognitive process, difficulties in this area can sometimes stem from other underlying challenges, such as poor attention, language processing issues, or visual-spatial difficulties, rather than a memory problem alone. Executive functioning challenges, such as difficulties with planning, organising, or monitoring information, can also impact a child’s ability to learn and recall effectively.
A thorough evaluation includes exploration of the underlying causes of memory-related concerns to clarify which cognitive processes are contributing to the child’s learning profile. This enables us to provide targeted strategies and recommendations to support their learning, build independence, and help them confidently demonstrate what they know.
Academic Skills: Literacy, Writing, and Numeracy
The development of academic skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics is a complex process that draws on multiple underlying cognitive and language systems. Difficulties in these areas are often one of the first signs that a child may benefit from further assessment. Understanding the specific areas where a child is struggling – and identifying the cognitive processes that may be contributing – can help inform tailored interventions that support both learning and confidence.
Reading and Spelling
The ability to read and spell fluently depends on a coordinated interplay between phonological processing, language comprehension, visual recognition, and working memory. Phonological processing includes skills such as recognising sounds within words (phonemic awareness), segmenting and blending sounds, and manipulating these sounds to form new words. Phonics builds on these foundations by linking sounds with written letters or letter patterns.
Children with reading or spelling difficulties may have trouble identifying and manipulating sounds, recognising common spelling patterns, or automatically retrieving familiar words. These difficulties can lead to slow or effortful reading, problems with spelling accuracy, or reduced reading comprehension, particularly as text complexity increases. Assessment of these skills typically involves examining a child’s decoding abilities, sight word recognition, phonological awareness, nonword reading, and spelling of familiar and unfamiliar words.
It’s important to consider that reading difficulties may also arise from broader language weaknesses (e.g., vocabulary or syntax) or attentional difficulties, which can affect focus and comprehension.
Written Expression
Writing draws on a wide range of cognitive and motor abilities. For younger children, handwriting involves fine motor coordination, visual-motor integration, and motor planning. For older children and adolescents, writing becomes increasingly language-based, requiring the ability to organise ideas, construct meaningful sentences, apply grammar rules, and structure extended text.
Some children struggle with transcription-level writing (e.g., handwriting, spelling, punctuation), while others may have difficulty with composition-level tasks (e.g., planning and organising a narrative or persuasive text). Written language difficulties may result in limited output, reduced clarity of ideas, avoidance of writing tasks, or underperformance compared to oral expression.
Assessment in this area typically explores fine motor skills, writing fluency, sentence construction, and higher-level skills such as text organisation and coherence. It also considers how language formulation, memory, and executive functioning (e.g., planning, monitoring, and self-correction) contribute to the writing process.
Numeracy Skills
Maths learning is multifaceted and requires not only number knowledge but also the ability to apply logic, recognise patterns, and hold and manipulate information in working memory. Foundational numeracy skills begin with understanding quantity, counting principles, and number relationships. As maths becomes more abstract, students are required to follow multi-step procedures, translate worded problems into calculations, and apply learned strategies across different contexts.
Children who struggle with maths may show weaknesses in basic number sense, retrieval of number facts, or procedural fluency. Others may have difficulties understanding mathematical language, keeping track of multi-step problems, or applying strategies flexibly – often pointing to weaknesses in working memory, attention, or executive function.
Comprehensive assessment typically includes tasks that assess basic arithmetic, number processing, calculation fluency, and problem-solving. It’s also important to understand how cognitive and emotional factors – such as anxiety around maths – may be impacting performance.
Why Assess Academic Skills?
Academic assessments do more than just identify performance gaps. They help to uncover how a child is learning, not just what they’ve learned. For children experiencing ongoing difficulties, academic concerns are often the visible outcome of deeper challenges in areas such as attention, language processing, memory, or executive functioning. By evaluating literacy and numeracy within the broader context of cognitive development, neuropsychological assessment provides a deeper understanding of a child’s learning profile – and offers evidence-based strategies to support their educational journey.
Social and Emotional Functioning: Navigating Relationships and Feelings
Social and emotional functioning refers to a child’s ability to understand, express, and manage their emotions, as well as to interact effectively with others. These skills are fundamental for building positive relationships, developing empathy, and coping with the everyday challenges of growing up.
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