Individual Assessment : Assessment of the child's functioning, for example memory and other cognitive abilities, and social, emotional, language, speech, psychomotor and sensorimotor skills. On an individual level, assessment determines the progress of significant developmental achievements, aids in placement and promotion decisions, and diagnoses learning, teaching and emotional or behaviour difficulties experienced by the child.
Individual assessments are psychometric testing,
dynamic assessment, functional assessment and play-based assessment, observation and curriculum based assessment
Functional assessment: The process of determining the relationship between children's behaviour and the environmental factors that may cause or maintain certain behavioural patterns in the broader contextual setting.
Rating scales, direct observation and experimental methods are used.
Play-based assessment (PBA): The characteristic is the systematic observation of play to determine the child's
current functioning. It assessment through a play situation familiar to the child. It provides a medium of communication between the parents, significant caregivers, interventionists and the child. The team approach has proved to be the most effective, as the parent becomes actively involved in the assessment. PBA takes place in the child's natural environment, either by observing natural play or play activities introduced by the team.
Dynamic assessment: Involves prompting and teaching, it indicates the types of assistance that will help children to do their best. The assessor actively monitors and modifies the interaction with the learner to induce successful learning.
It does not focus on the amount of knowledge or number of skills that the child possesses, but rather on the potential for the individual to change when guided to do so, i.e. the meta-cognitive processes of functioning.
It provides a flexible, process-orientated approach to evaluating learning. It seeks to 'capture what unfolds' in social environments where meanings and perceptions are complex.
Observation: writing down everything that happens, or as complex as a rigorous naturalistic observation system that pinpoints the behaviours observed. It can be conducted either systematically or non-systematically in either a natural or clinical setting.
Curriculum-based language assessment (CBLA): The process of identifying and analysing potential gaps between the linguistic demands of a particular context and the learner's linguistic competence.