1. The National Agency for Special Needs
Education and Schools
The Swedish government’s support in
areas concerning special needs in
education.
Purpose
To support schools in helping their
pupils reach their educational goals.
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2. Promoting accessibility through psychological
assessment in individuals with deafblindness
Lynn Skei, Tina Bendixen, Emmi Tuomi, Vuokko Einarsson members of the
Cognition network connected to the Nordic center of Welfare and Social
issues

3. AGENDA for this presentation
• Why psychological assessment: assessment a tool for promoting development,
learning and increased accessibility
• What do we get: The childs developmental baseline
• How do we get it: through mapping the child's background, environment and assessing
different developmental domaines

4. We are:
• Clinical psychologists from Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Denmark working in the deafblind field
• In this context the word ‘clinical’ refers to working with
individuals in real life situations, understanding relationships,
and the connections between brain, mind, body and behavior,
together with relevant theorys

5. Why assessment
• assessment first and foremost is a tool for promoting learning,
development and increased accessibility
• Our experience is that many indviduals with deafblindness can be
missunderstood and that their abilities often are underestimatied

6. What do we get
• Knowledge and understanding of an unusual condition on an
individual and a group level (research).
• For exampel Lynn Skei is working on her PhD on CHARGE
syndrome, Emmi Tuomi is also doing her PhD, Cognitive
assessment of persons with deafblindness with multiple
disabilities.

7. What do we get
• Asssessment provides a baseline, which facilitate evaluation, it
is often a skewed profile, a snapshot of the functional level
“here and now”.
• Information about facilitating and limiting conditions in the
environment

8. The developmental profile is often skewed

9. What do we get
• Assessment enhances the awareness of the child’s resources
and challenges
• Can give us essential information of individual interventions that
can be helpful and motivating for the child:
• Mental strategies and techniques
• Technical aids

10. What do we get
• psychologists both have to describe the child´s developmental
possibilities as well as difficulties
• Describing, naming difficulties sometimes leads to diagnoses

11. How do we get the baseline:
by using a biopsychosocial model for understanding development
• A neuroconstructivist perspective on development
• Brofenbrenners bioecological system
• A transactional model of developmental

12. Bioecological system (Brofenbrenner, 1986)

13. Transactional model of development
(Sameroff & Chandler, 1974)

14. How do we get it: We consider psychological assessment as
a part of a multidiciplinarie effort
• Medical history, anamnestic information
• Interviews with significant others to get information of present
medical status, functions, participation and activity
• Observations: structured and naturalistic
• Individualized psychological assessment

15. We need to understand how deafblindness and other
conditions interact with each other
• We need to have knowledge of different conditions –
disabilities.
• For example, simultaneous disabilities, conditions can be more
difficult or easier to handle in everyday life due to cognitive
abilities.

16. How do we get the baseline:
• Relationship and communication is the core of assessment
• Our experience is that it is informative to expose the child to a testing
situation
• Through standardized methods with individual adjustments and
observations
• Through interpretation of information, behavior and the test results

17. How: assessing different functional domains
• Social cognition
• Learning and memory
• Executive function
• Language and communication
• Perceptual motor function
• Visuoperceptual, visuospatial and visuoconstructional function
(These domains together make up the general intelligence)

18. Concluding remarks
• In our assessments:
 we search for ways to relate and communicate with the child
 we search for resources in the child and the enviroment
 we try to find and describe the childs zone of proximal development
 we use the childs own baseline when measuring change and
development
 we always consider results in a developmental perspective

19. Contact details
Website: www.spsm.se
Phone: +46 10 473 50 00
Textphone: +46 10 473 68 00
vuokko.einarsson@spsm.se
Facebook SPSMsverige
Twitter @SPSMsverige
Instagram Specialpedagogiska skolmyndigheten
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