ABSTRACT
Working with children, their teachers, and their families has influenced my view of assessment and has taught me the importance of the process. The process must be appropriate, respectful and informative so that the data obtained is relevant to the questions being asked and sufficient to result in recommendations for change. As a practitioner, the faces of hundreds of children I have assessed float through my mind. I see the eager 7-year-old boy who became so concerned when he could not understand the directions to the task that his lip began to tremble, the 14-year-old girl who simply said “I don’t know” to large numbers of items on many subtests, the 10-year-old boy who finished every item just inside the outer limits of time so two additional hours had to be scheduled, the 16-year-old girl who was being recruited for a college basketball scholarship but whose reading was at the third grade level, and the 13-year-old boy who was suspended from school because he spent the day in the library so he “could learn something.” These children are very different from each other though their standard score profile might be similar. Clinical judgment can be defined as the human element in testing and is the critical component needed to make sense of scores in the context of the individual being evaluated.
