INTERDISCIPLINARY ASSESSMENTS: AN ADDED VALUE!
At the Clinique Psycho-Optimale de Laval, we promote an interdisciplinary approach to assess your child by integrating various disciplines and collaborating together as a team in order to establish the strengths and weaknesses profile of your child. This specific approach helps in enriching the assessments.
What’s an interdisciplinary assessment?
The interdisciplinary assessment consists of combining and connecting results of different sciences such as psychology and orthopedagogy). Not only does it supply a multiple diagnostic viewpoint, but it also enables the convergence of indices obtained, leading to an accurate and specific diagnosis.
The interdisciplinary evaluation is considered more complete than a single discipline approach evaluation, allowing the integration of clinical observations, knowledge, and hypotheses provided by the two professionals in order to highlight and thoroughly explain the disorders and/or difficulties identified in the child. In addition, it also aids in improving the identification of rehabilitation tracks and establishing an efficient treatment plan.
The advantages
Since the interdisciplinary approach offers an assessment through different diagnostic views, it allows each professional to assess the child in a specialized field expertise of its own and thus deepen further the assessment and subsequent interventions.
Thus, following the assessment, the professional will take charge of the child at the emotional level of rehabilitation difficulties and/or identified disorders. It is therefore possible to provide a continuity of services, where the child does not have to adapt to a new professional.
Thereby, our clinical expertise helps us find how important the interdisciplinary assessment is when it adds value to the comprehension of cognitive, intellectual, attentional, emotional and behavioral profiles of a child as well as his strengths and weaknesses in learning.
It is the science of education whose purpose is the assessment and intervention for learners who may present learning difficulties in school. This practice is based on orthodidactique research, didactics, pedagogical and cognitive science.
Personality and affective assessment
The affective assessment is a process meant to evaluate the individual’s personality structure with the help of projective tests. The assessment helps to better understand the individual’s symptoms. This assessment highlights the individual’s relational patterns, his/her ways of thinking, how he/she perceives reality and the environment, and also allows one to appreciate the defence mechanisms put in place to protect himself against his/her own anxieties. Therefore, the main goal is to explore and deepen the understanding of the individual’s personality traits in order to help him better understand himself, and to recommend a treatment plan or course of action to treat the symptoms. The personality and affective assessment allows to identify the individual’s emotional needs leading the psychologist to either refer the client to the appropriate professional for treatment or begin a psychotherapy process with him.