How Testing for Cognitive Abilities Can Help both Adults and Children

In the current world, adults and children are under tremendous pressure, usually from their peers as well as parents, to perform well in their exams and tests. Even getting in a good preschool involves passing some sort of tests, so at an age where children should be playing and enjoying their lives, they have to take tests to get ahead in academic life.

Assessing Deficits in Children

Many of the schools in the United Kingdom now have benchmarks and goals to test children before they gain admission to the school. This trend where students are constantly being graded to determine their success based on tests against their contemporaries is still going on.
One of the tests is the D-KEFS test which helps in providing a full assessment of cognitive thinking, creativity, executive function, abstract thinking, etc., which is considered as a key component of functioning of thinking. These tests are administered to both adults and children and have to be completed in 90 minutes to test the above-mentioned items in different modalities.

Checking Adult Cognitive Abilities

When adults do not perform as per preset benchmarks, then they have to be assessed for the possibility of some sort of learning disability, and the main test to assess them in the United Kingdom is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale for the United Kingdom or WAIS-IV UK. These assessments are available as interactive digital platform to construct testing modalities at different levels. This type of testing is done for adults from the ages of sixteen to ninety and it gives them tests to check for fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. These modules include the administrative manual, the stimulus books numbers 1 and 2, the answer and response books of the stimulus tests, record forms, online training and technical manual etc.

Clinical Assessment for Children

To diagnose possibilities of learning difficulties and attention disorder syndromes in children, you can use the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition for the United Kingdom or WISC-IV UK. The latest testing scale makes more advances than the previous edition providing a clinical tool that represents the latest trends in thinking and research.  The aim of these tests is to test children for different modalities like word reasoning, matrix reasoning, picture concepts, letter and number sequencing, and cancellation. Using these tests gives parents or testers an insight to understand the thought processes of children and to check for any deficiencies.