A Parent’s Guide to Special Education Assessments
When your kid is referred for a full evaluation, the special education assessments the school plans to run are usually listed on a consent form you sign. That list might include five tests. It might include twelve. Most of them come with acronyms like CTOPP-2, WIAT-4, WJ-IV, KTEA, BASC, BRIEF, or WISC-V.
It’s a lot. Nobody sits you down and explains what each special education assessment actually measures before you sign the form.
This page is that explanation. For each test your school is likely to use, you will find what domain it covers (reading, math, phonological processing, executive function), what a strong or weak score looks like, and what it does and does not tell you about your child’s learning profile.
The goal is simple. By the time you walk into the IEP meeting to review results, you should know what each number represents, which patterns to flag, and what to ask the evaluator directly.