Do we need to assess a child’s intellectual ability level if we’re mainly concerned about their academic abilities or attention?

Cognitive assessment with children is about finding out what the child struggles with so that the school and family can help maximise their learning outcomes. A child who struggles with reading or maths may have a ‘pure’ deficit in one of those areas, but very often there will be other areas of difficulty (such as language skills or conceptual reasoning skills) that will need consideration also.

Another issue is that if two children both have reading skills at the 10th percentile (i.e., performing better than 10% of children their age), one of them might have average intellectual abilities (i.e., the 50th percentile) whereas the other may have intellectual ability at the 10th percentile: these two profiles would lead to very different recommendations for the family and school.

So we would always assess a child’s ability level so that we have something to compare their academic skills to, and so that we can identify underlying issues that may help us better understand their academic profile.