Cognitive and emotional assessments of children are both important activities to help professionals identify any developmental delays early.
With this early identification good programmes to address deficit can be put in place to make a difference before the delay gets more pronounced.
However there are other reasons why both cognitive and emotional assessment matters are more to do with strengths building than deficit mending.
The more we understand about a child's strengths the more we are able to work with those strengths and design learning experiences for them at which they will succeed.
Success breeds success and this makes it much easier for the child to tackle needs later when they have a solid foundation of successful experiences to fall back on rather than thinking of themselves as failures when they try something and fail again...
and again.
Cognitive assessment of children used to be done by the use of the IQ test which, in retrospect, set many people up for a lifetime of feeling like 'a loser' when they were placed in educational streams which indicated to them - and everyone else that they were less bright than others.
The danger with purely cognitive assessment is that it fails to take into account the multiple intelligences we all have.
In other words the question becomes not 'how smart are you?' but rather 'in what ways are you smart'.
Assessment tools that are designed to capture cognitive intelligence often do not contain this theory of multiple intelligences and only look at linguistic, logical and spatial intelligence - that means that many children whose great learning strength lies in experiencing a situation and extracting the learning from it in retrospect rather than reading about it are missed in the standard testing.
If you are considering useful ways to assess in your organisation it is always better to consider how holistic you can make it and be as inclusive as possible.
One test will never give you an accurate picture of a child's capacity and it is the holistic view that will give you the information you need to design learning programmes that will help the child develop.
Emotional assessment is even more difficult as there is much less information about the 'norms' for any age and stage than there is for the 'cognitive' assessments mentioned above.
Nevertheless gaining an idea of how strong a child is in their emotional maturation ie.
, how well they can process their own information and how well they can read the body language of others is an essential task in today's world.
The capacity a child has to be 'emotionally intelligent' is very linked to their overall success in the world - their flexibility, stability under stress and ability to work well in groups and get on with others.
Making sure that emotional development is part of a holistic assessment model is vital if a really useful picture of the child's capacities is to be built up.
These assessments are generally completed by adults on behalf of younger children as self assessed emotional competence is very hard to do.
Ideally several adults should collaborate with the child as this aspect is assessed as different people give different emotional responses to different people - thus several views on a child's capacity can be very useful.