Toronto Psychological Assessments
Dr. O'Connor, a Toronto psychologist, offers Psychological Assessments for children, adolescents and young adults.
Psychological Assessments Can Help.
Psychological assessments increase understanding of child and adolescent concerns and how to help.
A psychological assessment can enhance understanding of the concerns in a young person that worry you. Get "beneath the surface" and learn more about what is contributing to and maintaining the concerns that worry you. What are the young person's strengths and particular talents? What are his needs and what interventions are most likely to help?
Learn more about the challenges that a child, adolescent or young adult is showing and how to help. Does she have a Learning Disability? Is she anxious or feeling depressed and unsure of herself? Does she exhibit attention or behavior problems? Is he or she showing trauma symptoms, or symptoms of a brain injury? How serious are these concerns? Do they require the support of a professional, and if so what kind of support would help?
Find out how the young person is coping with specific challenges and stressors such as divorce or parental addiction? Is he/she feeling stressed? Does he/she lack self-esteem or confidence?
These are some of the questions a psychological assessment can answer. Psychological Assessments also lead to recommendations including parenting, teaching and treatment interventions to help promote positive outcomes in the young people you care about and work with.
How Does It Work?
When Dr. O'Connor conducts an assessment with a child or young person she relies on information from a variety of sources. This includes background information gathered from the young person's parents, teachers or other significant adults, as well as information contained in school reports, and other records or obtained during previous assessments.
Dr. O'Connor may also use questionnaires, behavior rating scales and other informal measures to learn more about the child or adolescent, including his social, emotional and behavioral functioning, as well as his neuropsychological processing skills.
Dr. O'Connor relies on standardized assessment measures and compares the young person to others of the same age across a range of behaviors and skills. Standardized measures include intelligence and cognitive/learning measures, academic tests and tests to measure the young person's neurocognitive processing ability, across a range of domains. These include memory functioning, attention, executive skills and auditory/verbal and visual spatial processing skills.
The assessment takes several hours to complete and usually involves more than one session.
Dr. O'Connor tailors the assessment to the young person's specific needs and uses assessment tools and approaches that address the concerns that are at issue for that child, adolescent or young adult.
How Can A Psychological Assessment Help?
Dr. O'Connor's psychological assessments sharpen the focus or "open a window" on the young person's strengths and specific needs. You will have a clearer picture of how the child, adolescent or young person is doing across various developmental and/or neurocognitive domains.
You will also have a clearer understanding of the factors that are involved in the child or adolescent problems that worry you and what kind of interventions can help.
In addition, the psychological assessment provides recommendations and interventions to help you, help the young people you care about and work with. Recommendations address areas of specific need such as attention and learning problems, or emotional concerns, including depressive symptoms, and anxiety or behavior and social problems, as well as aggressive, acting out behaviors.
The focus of both the assessment and the recommendations that follow from it, may also include trauma related concerns, both acute or ongoing complex trauma or neurological concerns,
such as learning disabilities, or acquired brain injuries such as a
concussion or mild TBI.
You will learn how a child compares to children of the same age in specific areas of child development.
Following the assessment, Dr. O'Connor may refer you to resources in the community or relevant books and other resources to address the young person's needs. If applicable, Dr. O'Connor will provide recommendations to help the child cope with specific problems and concerns like divorce, parental addiction, trauma, the loss of a parent or stress, and/or behavior and school problems.
More About How A Psychological Assessment Helps
Dr. O'Connor's Psychological Assessments increase understanding of adolescent and child problems and how to help. Use this service to:
- Find out what is contributing to and maintaining the adolescent and child problems that worry you.
- Find out how a young person is doing in specific areas of child development - the social, emotional, behavioral and cognitive/academic.
- Find out about a young person's needs and how to help.
- Discover a child's strengths and build on where "things are working" and going well.
- Learn how a child is coping with specific challenges or concerns (e.g. divorce, parental addiction, social concerns, trauma related issues,) and what you can do to help.
- Find out where you need to intervene to reduce stress in a child, build positive coping strategies and enhance the young person's competence, psychological well being and resilience.
To learn more about how a psychological assessment can help, click here.
Dr. O'Connor's assessments increase understanding of child problems and how to help. They also help promote positive outcomes in the children you care about and work with.
In addition, Dr. O'Connor's Psychological Assessments integrate a school neuropsychological component into the assessment piece, and apply this component to the intervention strategies that follow from it.
To learn more about Dr. O'Connor's Assessment Based Solutions for children, adolescents and young adults, click here.
Contact Dr. O'Connor to learn more about her Psychological Assessments and how they can help.