What is a SPARK Learning Assessment?
The SPARK Learning Assessment is a whole-child evaluation that gives parents and caregivers useful information about their child’s own learning needs much faster than traditional clinical or classroom evaluations. Typically, while a family waits on a lengthy waitlist for diagnostic assessments a learner may fall further and further behind. This wait time causes continued problems both in terms of student achievement and feelings of self-worth. Learnfully saw the need to create an effective assessment that can be conducted immediately to avoid this dilemma.
The value of an assessment of learning combined with personalized learning recommendations and pairing the student with an educational specialist, provides the greatest potential to improve learning outcomes for a child.
There are many benefits of the SPARK Learning Assessment, including:
- Provides a comprehensive learning overview of your student’s performance in as little as two hours.
- Establishes a cognitive baseline to help get your child on the path to their potential.
- Gives detailed information on students’ strengths and how they learn best.
- Offers recommendations for important areas in need of skill development and the impact of their learning in and out of the classroom.
- Matches a learner with a personalized instruction plan including student-learning objectives aligned to their unique strengths and weaknesses.
- Serves as a tool to educate your child’s team in order to create clear communication.
Typically, while a family waits on a lengthy waitlist to see a psychologist for a full psycho-educational evaluation, a learner may fall further and further behind, experiencing negative results both in terms of academic achievement and feelings of self-worth.
To set up a SPARK Assessment call or text 888-459-6450 or email contact@learnfully.com. If you’d like to know what happens at each step of the assessment process here is a detailed explanation of what to expect and why each step is important to students’ learning:
What is a SPARK Learning Assessment?
- Getting started
- Taking the SPARK Assessment
- Caregiver consultation & learner’s instructional plan
- Educational specialist matching: Connecting learners to their best-fit specialist
- Ongoing student progress monitoring
Getting Started
The goal of the SPARK Learning Assessment is to identify gaps that exist between student potential and student performance. We then recommend academic programs proven to develop the right skills and strategies to close the gap. To do this, our assessment coordinator starts with a caregiver phone call for the primary purpose of understanding what areas impact the learner’s ability to thrive. During the call, we have a brief questionnaire to uncover a more fully-formed picture of a learner’s profile. This useful feedback helps us personalize the evaluation to target a child’s challenge areas.
After the call, we’ll share the Learnfully Caregiver Survey. We respect and appreciate the perspective of our caregivers, so we ask that they fill out a 10-15 minute survey prior to scheduling the SPARK Learning Assessment. Once submitted, we quickly follow up to create the assessment plan.
The goal of the SPARK Learning Assessment is to identify any gaps that exist between a child’s potential and their current performance, and recommend programming that has been proven to develop the right skills and strategies to close the gap.
Taking the SPARK Learning Assessment
The SPARK Learning Assessment typically takes two one-hour sessions to complete. We schedule the evaluation using all available interpretative information so our specialists can provide the most accurate appraisal of a learner’s skillset . On the day(s) of the student assessment a battery of measures will be conducted, reflecting the needs of the learner.
The SPARK Assessment measures five skill components:
 | Emotional & behavioral: Helps determine any social-emotional factors that can inhibit the learning process, like body regulation, distractibility, endurance and more. |
 | Cognitive skills: A baseline that measures a learner’s reasoning, processing and problem-solving capacity. Those with learning differences and average-to-high IQs often have underdeveloped executive function profiles, resulting in underutilized cognitive abilities. |
 | Executive functioning skills: Scores on a set of metacognitive skills used to control abilities and behaviors like attention, organization, planning and working memory. Understanding a student’s learning experience is crucial to help them consume and process information, facilitating their learning. |
 | Literacy skills: Measures a learner’s reading and writing skills at grade level. Skill areas tested include: decoding, fluency, comprehension, automaticity and more. |
 | Math skills: Measures a learner’s math skills at grade level, based on abilities in: computation, problem solving, story problems and conceptual understanding. |
Caregiver consultation & learner’s instructional plan
Next steps following the different forms of assessment include a consultation to discuss the results of the report. A specialist will conduct this meeting within a few days after the final evaluation. During this meeting we will walk through our findings and review individualized recommendations to place the learner on the path to their full potential. We welcome the opportunity to collaborate and connect with a learner’s team (such as teachers, outside specialists and others in their learning process) and are happy to review the report with them as well. Once a learner is enrolled in programming matched to their needs, we stay in close communication to discuss observations and progress in student work.
Research substantiates that established rapport and strong connectivity between a learner and their educator yields the highest level of results, thereby expediting progress.
Our report is broken into easy-to-follow sections, as follows:
- Summary
- Tests conducted
- Learner strengths
- Learner challenges
- Learning impact
- Recommendations
- Skills targets
- Results
- Appendix
Educational Specialist matching: Connecting learners to their best-fit specialist
Research supports that a strong connection between a learner and their educator yields the highest level of student success. Thus the importance of specialist-matching during our SPARK Learning Assessment. A child is matched to an education specialist based on several factors, like the specialist’s training, certifications and personality characteristics. We also take into account student motivation and strengths to help bolster their attitude toward learning and furthering progress through the school year and beyond.
Ongoing progress monitoring
Continuously measuring, monitoring and communicating student understanding is an ongoing process and embedded into everything we do. This starts with the SPARK Assessment. Within the included report, we define short- and long-term goals for a learner’s instructional plan. Once we begin support services for a learner, we provide frequent session notes and ongoing feedback through monthly progress update meetings, both written with the short- and long-term goals outlined in our various assessment methods. Additionally, our assessment specialists reassess a learner every 6-12 months, depending on the frequency and duration of a learner’s instructional sessions.
In Close…
The SPARK Learning Assessment provides the perfect opportunity for caregivers, educators and the learner to uncover what is blocking their path to potential. Rather than waiting months to see a psychologist, our SPARK Assessment can help save time, money and invaluable learning time.
