Part 5, School & Psychological Testing: Diagnosing and Solving School Learning Disabilities in Epilepsy

In the last article we covered the social and psychological causes to learning difficulty that can be created by epilepsy. Over the last two articles we gained a fairly complete picture of problems that may be due to the physical disorder of epilepsy and problems due to its unique impact on the social aspects of the classroom. Now it is time to begin teasing out each of these threads of influence in order to determine which things are helping or hurting a particular child's performance in the classroom. We start with taking a snapshot of the student's abilities by using testing. While describing the problem is important, it is also essential to measure the problem. That is what testing does. There are specialized threads of testing just as there are different threads of influence in the problem of learning disabilities in epilepsy. A comprehensive evaluation would include the following types of tests: Achievement, IQ, Neuropsychological, and Psychological. Not all kids will require all of these to define the problem exactly and to plan an appropriate treatment.