In The News Evaluating Children Preparing for Preschool
Evaluating Children Preparing for Preschool
| 04 January 2010
ADVANCE Newsmagazines
Posted on: January 4, 2010 | By Susan N. Schriber Orloff, OTR/L
Evaluating Children Preparing for Preschool
When a family is preparing to send a child for preschool, the occupational therapist can help by giving the parents a definitive profile of the child's current abilities. The following assessments may be appropriate.
For an OT-developed, criterion-referenced developmental checklist in .pdf format, click here. It is copyright protected but may be used with permission and acknowledgement by Susan Orloff.
Test of Pictures/Forms/Letters/Numbers/Spatial Orientation and Sequencing Skills determines a child's ability to visually perceive pictures, forms, letters and numbers in the correct direction and to visually perceive words with the letters in the correct sequence. Difficulties with these skills would relate to reading issues and/or written language problems.
The Denver Developmental is a test of developmentally based activities incremented by chronological ages. It isolates the areas of personal, social, fine-motor, adaptive, language and gross-motor.
The Motor-Free Visual Perception Test (3rd edition) is a standardized test that evaluates visual discrimination, form constancy, visual memory (sequential and non-sequential), visual closure and directionality.
The PEER is a multi-task evaluation that combines neuro-developmental, behavioral and health components. It provides normative, scored observations that help define developmental areas of concern. It evaluates developmental attainment, associated observation and neuro-maturation, as well as a task analysis of the input (visual, verbal, sequential, somatic), storage (short-term memory, experiential acquisition) and output (fine motor, motor sequence, verbal sequence and verbal expressive) functions.
The Visual Motor Inventory (VMI) is a standardized test that identifies significant difficulties some children may have in integrating or coordinating perceptual and motor (finger and hand movement) abilities. Visual-motor integration is the degree to which visual perception and finger-hand movements are coordinated.
The Wide Range Assessment of Visual Motor Abilities tests the child in the three spheres of visual motor/perceptual development. It provides a psychometrically sound assessment of visual-motor, visual-spatial, and fine-motor skills.
