Psychological Assessments for Infants and Young Children

Abstract

Assessing tools to measure cognitive performance in young children has a large variety. The variation is majorly in the procedure while the purpose of different assessments remains same. There are details for the tests separately but there are few studies comparing the tests. This paper compares two assessing procedures of Social Emotional Screening Assessments; Early Screening Project (ESP) and Preschool and Kindergarten Behavioral Scale (PKBS-2). ESP is found to be more useful than PKBS-2 when there is a capacity constraint while PKBS-2 is largely accepted for generalization as it covers profound details.

Table of Content

Abstractii

Introduction1

Psychological Assessments1

Early Screening Project (ESP)2

Pre-school and Kindergarten Behavioral Scale, Second Edition (PKBS-2)5

Comparisons6

Value of Using Assessments in Early Childhood Setting7

Recommendations7

Conclusion10

References11

Psychological Assessments for Infants and Young Children

Introduction

The number and range of the techniques of assessing children's social-emotional development has drastically increased over the past years. As appropriate normative information with more questionnaire and rating scales become available and as quantifiable interview methods and observational prototypes are standardized the versatility and quality of these methods will continue to grow.

There exists a foremost difficulty in determining suitable methods for assimilating data across different methods and resources. Conflicting information provided by multiple informant makes data integration further complicated. However, informative conflicting data often put in an added dimension to the evaluation, particularly in terms of understanding the systems of entity functions.

Assessing infants and young children in order to abstract their development growth is essential in their learning process. The process of assessment of young children is different from that of the children above the age of 8 because the former face their own constraints in learning. Though a variety of tests is there to assess infants the psychologists keep searching for effective and best measure of the development process. As the requirements of measurement varies from stage to stage in infants and toddlers, different tests carry out the different features of the development process.

Psychological Assessments

The first assessment of a child is not the one taken for the developed skills but for the skills with which the child is born that assessment is a medical test. This helps in placing the children to the certain type of education. For example if a child is blind by birth then a special education is required. In this way a child receives the exact needs of skills development.

A child right after the birth to the end of 12th month from the birth is referred as an infant (medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com). They are different from children of other age group in a way that the muscular development proceeds from the head downward and it goes on this way till the child starts walking. This kind of growth requires the process of assessing the children effectively at every stage. In this paper the kinds of assessments of children under the age of 8 are discussed that are tested for learning skills and behavioral development.

Various tests of assessment are used for the measurement of the psychological condition, level of skill and characteristics of personality, born and ...