Psychoeducational Evaluation for Educational Therapists: What You May Do With the Report
A parent emails you a forty-page psychoeducational evaluation three days before your first session. It has a cover page from a licensed psychologist, eleven tables of scores, a paragraph headed Diagnostic Impressions, and six pages of recommendations, two of which name you by role. Nobody has told you what you are allowed to do with any of it.
That question — the scope question, not the psychometrics question — is the one this post is about. A psychoeducational evaluation for educational therapists is three things at once: a planning document, a constraint, and an invitation to overstep.
The guidance on which is which is scattered. Two AET documents that do not agree with each other. Four test publishers who agree with each other almost exactly. And one school psychology ethics code that turns out to contain the single most useful sentence in the whole literature for a private practitioner.
This is not a guide to scoring tests. You are not the examiner. It is a guide to the part that actually happens in practice: a report someone else wrote lands in your inbox, and you have to turn it into an intervention plan without claiming something you cannot defend.
Nothing here is legal advice. Where the boundary is set by statute or by a state agency rather than by a professional body, this post says so and stops.
AET publishes two documents about interpretation and they do not say the same thing
Start with the awkward part, because everything else hangs off it.
The Educational Therapy Fact Sheet lists, first among the things educational therapists are skilled in, "administering formal and informal educational assessments for which they are both qualified and trained to use, and/or interpreting assessment results." Interpretation is named as a skill of the role.
The Code of Ethics and Standards for the Professional Practice of Educational Therapy, Revision #9, 2025, says at II.I.D that educational therapists shall "seek interpretation of assessment data from professionals in related fields (e.g. medical, psychological, speech/language, neuropsychological)." Interpretation is named as something you go and get from somebody else.
Both documents are current. Both are AET's. Neither references the other on this point, and no AET document reconciles them in print.
The Fact Sheet says you interpret assessment results. The Code of Ethics says you seek interpretation from related fields. Both are current, both are AET's, and no published document reconciles them.
The reading that actually holds
Read the two clauses closely and a boundary does emerge, but it is a boundary by instrument domain, not by act.
The Fact Sheet's skill claim is scoped in its own sentence: "formal and informal educational assessments for which they are both qualified and trained to use." The domain is educational assessment, and the qualifier is training. The Code's II.I.D names four fields — medical, psychological, speech/language, neuropsychological — and none of them is education. Read together, the boundary falls where the data came from, not on whether the verb is "interpret."
So an educational therapist interpreting a curriculum-based measure they administered is doing something AET's own Fact Sheet lists as a competency. The same therapist interpreting a Full Scale IQ, a processing-speed index, or a receptive-language composite is working on data from one of the four fields II.I.D names.
Two further clauses close the loop, and they are the ones that bind regardless of which document you start from:
II.I.B — "select and use appropriate assessment instruments, recognizing their limitations with respect to reliability, validity, and bias."
II.I.C — "use only those assessment instruments for which they have been adequately trained."
II.I.C is the clause that governs, and it binds independently of whether a publisher would sell you the kit. Training, not purchasing eligibility, is the standard AET sets. We covered the purchasing side of that in detail in Achievement Test Qualification Levels — the letters on a publisher's product page are a storefront rule, and they are not the same thing as AET's competence standard.
Worth saying plainly: this is a reading of two documents, not a position AET has published. If a clean answer matters for your practice, ask AET directly rather than relying on anyone's synthesis, including this one.
The DO NOT list has four items, and the parenthetical is load-bearing
The Fact Sheet's most-quoted passage is the header "Educational Therapists DO NOT:" followed by four items:
diagnose administer cognitive, intelligence, or psychological tests (unless otherwise qualified to do so) practice psychotherapy prescribe medication
The second item is routinely quoted without its parenthetical, which misstates AET's position and contradicts the same page. The Fact Sheet affirms, four bullets earlier, that educational therapists are skilled in administering assessments "for which they are both qualified and trained to use." Quote the item whole or do not quote it.
Note also what the list does not say. It does not prohibit reading a report. It does not prohibit using a psychologist's findings to plan instruction. It does not prohibit explaining what a score means in plain language to a family. It prohibits diagnosing, and it conditions the administration of cognitive tests on qualification.
Those are narrower prohibitions than the field's oral tradition usually reports, and the gap between the four printed items and what practitioners believe the list says is one of the more persistent pieces of received wisdom in educational therapy.
Four publishers draw the administer-versus-interpret line, and they draw it in the same place
Here is what makes the AET tension navigable: the test publishers have already drawn the line, they drew it before anyone asked about educational therapists, and they all drew it in almost exactly the same position.
MHS, in the Conners 4 manual
The clearest statement in print comes from MHS's chapter on users and user qualifications:
Although individuals who do not have advanced formal training in psychology or psychometrics can administer and score the Conners 4 by following the procedures outlined in this manual, interpretation should be conducted only by individuals with those qualifications described above.
Administration and scoring on one side; interpretation on the other. MHS's B-level qualification requires "graduate-level courses in tests and measurement at a university or… equivalent documented training," and the manual adds that interpreters should be familiar with the manual, with test standards guidance such as the International Test Commission's, and with the standards applying in their country of practice.
Riverside Insights, on the Woodcock-Johnson
Riverside's own help documentation makes the same split, and is unusually explicit about the gap between the two sides.
On administration: "Any person administering the WJ IV COG needs a thorough knowledge of the exact administration and scoring procedures and an understanding of the importance of adhering to standardized procedures." On interpretation: "Graduate-level training in cognitive ability assessment and a background in diagnostic decision-making are requisite," with a practicum-type course covering administration and interpretation of standardized cognitive tests named as a minimum.
Riverside then does something the other publishers do not, and it is worth noting: it says the final call belongs to "the school district and/or overseeing organization." The publisher explicitly declines to be the last word.
Pearson, in the WISC-V interpretive report
Pearson's published sample interpretive report, dated 10/20/2020, carries the line "This report is only valid if signed by a qualified professional" and characterises its own recommendations as "meant to be an aid to you as a clinician, not a substitute for individualized recommendations that should be provided by a professional who is familiar with the examinee."
That second sentence cuts both ways for an educational therapist. The publisher is saying the canned recommendations are weaker than individualised ones from somebody who knows the child. In most private-practice arrangements, after eight weeks, that person is you.
NASP, from the other side of the table
The NASP 2020 Principles for Professional Ethics, effective 1 July 2020, contains the reciprocal obligation. Standard II.5.2: "School psychologists do not promote nor condone the use of restricted psychological and educational tests or other assessment tools or procedures by individuals who are not qualified to use them."
So the psychologist who wrote the report you are holding is bound not to condone unqualified use of the instruments behind it. That is a constraint on them, not on you — but it shapes what they will and will not hand over, and knowing the clause exists changes how you frame the ask.
Four organisations, four documents, one line in the same place: administering and scoring is a procedural skill; interpreting is a trained judgement. None of them mentions educational therapists. All of them apply.
One more Pearson sentence worth knowing
Pearson's qualifications policy adds a provision that gets overlooked, and it is the one that most often describes how educational therapists actually work: "Some tests may be administered or scored by individuals with less training, as long as they are under the supervision of a Qualified User."
Supervision is an authorised route, not a workaround. It is the same structure that governs practicum hours across the credentialing bodies, which we mapped in Educational Therapy Supervision Requirements.
Note too how Pearson frames its top tier: "Tests with a C qualification require a high level of expertise in test interpretation." The letter on the product page is explicitly an interpretation bar, even though it functions as a purchasing gate. That is the cleanest statement any publisher makes about what the levels are really for.
The document all four publishers are pointing at
When MHS tells you to be familiar with "standards pertinent to their country of practice (e.g., AERA/APA/NCME Standards in the U.S.)", it is naming a specific book.
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, 2014 edition, is published jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, and AERA describes it as addressing "professional and technical issues of test development and use in education, psychology, and employment." It is catalogued in ERIC and a reference copy is posted publicly.
Two practical points follow for a practitioner who did not train in measurement.
First, the Standards are the upstream authority every publisher defers to, so when a manual says "consistent with professional standards," this is the document meant. Second, they are a book you buy rather than a code you can quote from a web page, which is a real barrier — and it is part of why measurement literacy in this field is unevenly distributed.
The ITC Guidelines on Test Use are the freely available counterpart. Three of their clauses are directly usable by an educational therapist reading somebody else's report:
2.7.1 — "Have a good professional understanding of the test's theoretical or conceptual basis, technical documentation and guidance on the use and interpretation of the scale scores."
2.7.5 — "Interpret results in the light of available information about the person being tested (including age, gender, schooling, culture and other factors)."
2.2.4 — "Use tests only for those purposes where relevant and appropriate validity evidence is available."
That last one is the sharpest. A test validated to identify a reading disability was not necessarily validated to select an intervention, and treating a diagnostic instrument as an instructional planning tool is a change of purpose. ITC 2.9.4 says so directly: "Be aware of the need to re-evaluate the evidence of validity if the purpose for which a test is being used is changed."
What is actually in a psychoeducational report, and which parts are yours
The most useful published map of a report's anatomy is not from a publisher. It is the IDA Assessment Guidelines (Tridas, Cardenas-Hagan, White, Elbeheri and Cheesman, June 2021), which sets out a four-part structure and is candid in its executive summary that "there are no generally accepted guidelines for the assessment of dyslexia in English or other languages that are based on research evidence."
The four parts, and what each is worth to you:
Part 1 — History
The guidelines list eight history components, including main concerns, educational history, health, family history and social history. They make a distinction worth stealing: the examiner should elicit "the main symptoms that triggered the request for the assessment (not just a diagnostic concern, e.g., 'My child needs an evaluation for dyslexia' vs. 'My child has trouble reading')."
This section is almost entirely yours. It is narrative, it is sourced from the family and the school, and reading it is not interpreting assessment data. It is also the section most likely to contain the thing that explains a score you cannot otherwise account for — three schools in four years, an unrepaired hearing loss, a period of chronic absence.
Part 2 — Administration of standardized tests, error analysis and behavioural observations
Eleven skill domains are named: cognitive, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, fluency, print awareness, working memory, decoding, spelling, oral language, text comprehension and writing.
The guidelines' treatment of error analysis is the practitioner's way in: "Error analysis can be a valuable component of an evaluation… this type of approach can help make objective observations that can provide explanations for the student's difficulties." Error patterns are instructional information. If the report contains them, they are the highest-value paragraphs in it for you, and they are frequently the shortest.
Behavioural observations sit in this part too, and the guidelines note that structured classroom observation can provide "critical information about a student's attention, impulse control, organizational skills, behavior/emotional regulation and socialization."
The instruments most likely to appear in this part of a report crossing an educational therapist's desk, with the publisher that sets each one's user rules: the WIAT-4 and KTEA-3 from Pearson; the Woodcock-Johnson V from Riverside Insights; the CTOPP-2 and BRIEF-2 from PAR; and the Conners 4 from MHS.
Riverside publishes a separate user qualification guide for its special-needs assessments. Which of these you are eligible to purchase, and which you are trained to use, are two different questions with two different answers.
Part 3 — Formulation of diagnoses
"It is necessary for the process of dyslexia assessment and the reports documenting such a process to include dedicated sections that provide rationale for making specific diagnoses."
This part is not yours. Read it, understand it, plan around it, quote it when writing to a school with consent — and do not extend it, qualify it, or restate it as your own conclusion. The seven items it may contain are diagnosis, cognitive processing, achievement, behavioural/emotional, social interactions, medical and social/environmental.
Part 4 — Recommendations
The guidelines say recommendations should address "the student's academic, behavioral/emotional, environmental, or medical needs."
Recommendations are the part practitioners most often treat as binding and which the publishers most explicitly treat as provisional. Pearson calls its own generated recommendations "an aid… not a substitute for individualized recommendations." A recommendation in a report is an input to your plan. It is not the plan.
The score metrics, and which ones answer an instructional question
Most score literacy content aimed at this material is written for parents. What follows is the practitioner version: not what the numbers mean, but which of them are load-bearing for an intervention decision.
Standard scores, percentile ranks and confidence intervals
Pearson's published WIAT-4 sample score report uses standard scores with a mean of 100, reports a 90% confidence interval for every composite and subtest, and gives seven descriptive categories running from Extremely low to Extremely high.
The WISC-V interpretive report defines the percentile rank plainly: "If the percentile rank for her Verbal Comprehension Index score is 92, for example, it means that she performed as well as or better than approximately 92% of children her age." And on the confidence interval: "For each composite score reported for Sample, there is a 95% certainty that her true score falls within the listed range."
Read the interval, not the point. Two reports on the same child can differ by several standard-score points and be describing the same true performance. If a report gives a point estimate with no interval, that is a limitation of the report, not a precision gain.
The composite is where information goes to hide, and Pearson's own sample proves it
The best demonstration of this is in Pearson's published WIAT-4 sample report, which is worth pulling up next to this paragraph. The sample examinee, an 11-year-old in sixth grade, has:
Total Achievement: 102 — Average
Word Reading: 71 — Very low
Spelling: 133 — Extremely high
Numerical Operations: 127 — Very high
Reading Comprehension: 98 — Average
Math Problem Solving: 91 — Average
Reading composite: 82 — Low average
A Total Achievement standard score of 102 is the single number most likely to be quoted back to you by a school, and it is describing a child who reads single words at the 3rd percentile. The composite is arithmetically correct and instructionally useless.
A Total Achievement score of 102 and a Word Reading score of 71 can belong to the same child. If a school quotes you the composite, ask for the subtest table.
Age and grade equivalents, and why Pearson tells you not to use them
The same sample report gives that child's Word Reading an age equivalent of 7:2 and a grade equivalent of 1.7. Both numbers are seductive and both are the ones parents remember.
Pearson publishes a resource on exactly this, and its position is unambiguous. Age and grade equivalents "should not be used for making diagnostic or placement decisions" (citing Bracken, 1988 and Reynolds, 1981). The technical reasons it gives:
"A similar change in raw scores of younger examinees and of older examinees will be represented quite differently in age equivalent scores."
"Age and grade equivalents are not a ratio or interval scale of measurement. They cannot be added, subtracted, or averaged."
Reliability "is much poorer for advanced test-takers" (citing McCauley & Swisher, 1984).
Pearson's own recommendation: "Standard scores are a more accurate representation of an examinee's ability because they are based not only on the mean at a given age level but also on the distribution of scores."
A grade equivalent of 1.7 does not mean the child reads like a first-grader in the seventh month. It means the child's raw score equals the median raw score of children at that grade point, on a test built for eleven-year-olds. Those are different claims, and only one of them is true.
The metric that answers your question, and it is usually not the percentile
Standard scores and percentile ranks answer a rank-order question. Riverside's technical document on the W score and the Relative Proficiency Index (Jaffe, 2025) puts the limitation bluntly: peer-comparison scores "merely show a person's rank order or 'place in the line'—the position at which their score falls within the distribution of scores."
The RPI answers a different question: "a measure of a person's proficiency in a skill, ability, or area of knowledge compared with average age- or grade-peers," expressed against the level of task at which same-age peers achieve 90% proficiency. The W score is the equal-interval metric all other WJ scores are derived from, and is the one designed to measure "an individual's progress over time."
For an educational therapist, that distinction is the whole ballgame. A percentile tells you where the child stands. An RPI tells you what the child can currently do with grade-level material, which is the input to a lesson plan. A W score tells you whether what you did last term moved anything — which is why it belongs in the same conversation as the tools in Progress Monitoring Tools Compared.
If a WJ V report crosses your desk and reports only standard scores and percentiles, the RPI and W scores exist in the scoring system and were simply not printed. That is a reasonable thing to ask the examiner for.
Profile analysis: what the report invites you to do, and what the research says
Every table of subtest scores is an invitation to find the pattern. Resist it, and have a citation ready for why.
McGill, Dombrowski and Canivez (2018), in the Journal of School Psychology, reviewed the history and the evidence and concluded that "the bulk of available empirical evidence continues to support the recommendation against using cognitive profile analysis as a focal point for diagnostic and treatment decisions in clinical practice."
The psychometric reason is short and it generalises to every test you will ever see: "If two scores are positively correlated, the reliability of their difference is always weaker than the average of the reliability coefficients of the two scores." Their worked example uses two composites with reliabilities of .88 and .96 correlating at .55; the reliability of the difference is .82, with a standard error of measurement of 12.47.
Read that last figure again. A difference of twelve standard-score points between two indexes — the kind of gap that gets a paragraph of narrative in a report — sits inside the measurement error of the comparison.
What this does not mean. It does not mean subtest data is worthless. It means a difference between two scores is a weaker measurement than either score, and that treating a profile shape as a treatment indicator is not supported.
Item-level error analysis, which is a different activity, remains exactly as useful as the IDA guidelines say it is. The evidence base for the underlying interventions is a separate question, which we took apart in Is Educational Therapy Evidence-Based?.
The corollary for your own practice
If profile analysis is a weak basis for a treatment decision when a psychologist does it with a full battery and a doctorate, it is not a stronger one when an educational therapist does it from a table in a PDF. The honest use of the score table is: locate the skills that are low, confirm them with your own curriculum-based measures, and teach those.
That is a decision sequence, not a decision rule, and it is the same sequence that governs instrument selection in Executive Function Assessment Tools, Compared.
What you may say to the family
This is where most of the real risk sits, because it happens conversationally and nobody writes it down.
AET's Code gives educational therapists an affirmative communication duty. II.II.E: "develop effective communication with parents/guardians, avoiding or interpreting technical terminology, using the primary language of the home and other modes of communication when appropriate." The clause literally contains the word "interpreting" and applies it to terminology, not to data.
II.II.I is the one that matters most here: "facilitate the understanding among parents/guardians, school personnel, and other professionals regarding the realistic limitations of each one's function and role." Explaining the limits of your own role is not a disclaimer you bolt on. AET makes it a duty.
The adjacent professions say the same thing about clarity. NASP 2020 Standard II.3.11: "School psychologists adequately interpret findings and present results in clear terms. They ensure that recipients understand assessment results so they can make informed choices."
The Joint Committee on Testing Practices' Rights and Responsibilities of Test Takers (August 1998) gives test takers the right to "receive a written or oral explanation of your test results within a reasonable amount of time after testing and in commonly understood terms."
And the ITC Guidelines on Test Use, version 1.2 (8 October 2013), at 2.8.3: "Ensure that the technical and linguistic levels of any reports are appropriate for the level of understanding of the recipients."
The practical split
Say: what a percentile rank is. What a confidence interval is. That a composite can average away a real weakness. What the report recommends. What you plan to teach and why. Which sections of the report you are using and which you are not.
Do not say: what the scores mean about the child's condition. Whether the diagnosis is right. Whether a different diagnosis fits better. Whether the child "really has" what the report says. Whether another evaluation would come out differently.
Route, do not answer: any question in the second list goes back to the examiner, under II.II.J — "facilitate referral to other appropriate professionals for services as needed."
A sentence that does all of this at once, and which is worth having ready: "That's an interpretation question and it belongs with the psychologist who wrote this — what I can tell you is which parts of it I'm using to plan, and why."
Can I identify a disability from this report?
No.
The Fact Sheet's first DO NOT item is the single word "diagnose." There is no parenthetical on that one and no qualifying clause anywhere in the Code of Ethics that softens it.
It is worth understanding that the prohibition is not arbitrary gatekeeping, because the measurement logic points the same way. NASP 2020 Standard II.3.6: "A psychological or psychoeducational assessment is based on a variety of different types of information from different sources. No single test or measure is used to make broad determinations regarding disability identification or services needed." A report is one source, gathered on one or two days, by one examiner.
There is also a class of question that looks like a scope question and is actually a legal one: whether a particular finding obliges a school to act, what a district must provide, and what any statute requires. Those are not questions this post or any professional body's code can answer for you. They belong with an attorney and with your state's education agency.
Getting the data you actually need
This is the section most likely to change what you do tomorrow, and it rests on one sentence.
NASP 2020 Standard II.5.1, on test security, ends with this: "At the request of a parent (or eligible student), it is also ethically permissible to provide copies of test protocols to a professional who is qualified to interpret them."
Three things follow.
The route runs through the parent. You do not request protocols from the examiner. The parent does, and the parent nominates you as the recipient.
The qualifier is "qualified to interpret." Which brings you straight back to II.I.C and to the publisher's own standard. If you are not trained on the instrument, this clause is not your route in, and asking anyway puts the psychologist in conflict with II.5.2.
Protocols are a different object from the report. Standard II.4.5 notes parents have the right to inspect, but not necessarily to copy, their child's answers, and that this right "may supersede the interests of test publishers."
The lower-friction ask, which usually gets you further
In practice, you rarely need the protocol. You need three things that are almost always releasable with a signed consent, under III.II.G — "communicate, with client/guardian consent, with other agencies… in information exchanges related to planning, coordination, evaluation, and training":
The full subtest table, not the composite summary the school quoted.
Any error analysis the examiner did and did not print.
Fifteen minutes with the examiner. A phone call in which you describe your plan and ask whether anything in the data argues against it is the highest-yield thing in this entire post, and it costs nothing.
NASP 2020 Standard II.3.10 is relevant to the third one in an unexpected way: "It is permissible for school psychologists to make recommendations based solely on a review of existing records. However, they should use a representative sample of records and explain the basis for, and the limitations of, their recommendations." The examiner is permitted to advise on records alone, with limitations stated. Ask them to.
Turning a report into an intervention plan
AET's Code is more specific about this step than practitioners generally realise.
II.I.A: "develop and interpret individual goals and objectives for educational therapy, based upon appropriate assessment procedures and/or local school mandates, in cooperation with clients, their parents/guardians, and allied professionals." Note three things in that clause: goals are based on assessment procedures; the development is collaborative; and "allied professionals" is named, which is the examiner.
II.I.N: "establish baseline data about the skills and needs of new clients and maintain accurate data for the purpose of decision making and consultation." Your baseline is yours. The report is not it. A standard score from March is not a baseline for instruction starting in September, and the report's own confidence intervals are the reason.
The sequence that follows from the clauses, rather than from anyone's preference:
Read the history and the observations first. They are narrative, they are yours, and they frame everything below.
Take the diagnostic formulation as given. Do not re-derive it.
Mine the score table for skill-level targets, not for profile shapes.
Establish your own baselines on the skills you intend to teach, with measures you are trained on.
Write goals against your baselines, referencing the report rather than resting on it. The mechanics are in How to Write an Educational Therapy Treatment Plan.
Monitor against your own measures, not against a re-test twelve months out.
Where the report names a program, the specification questions are the ones set out in Intervention Session Frequency and Duration and, for reading specifically, Reading Intervention Programs Compared and What "Orton-Gillingham Based" Actually Means. A recommendation naming a program is not a fidelity plan.
The National Center on Intensive Intervention's data-based individualization framework is the closest thing to a published process for the middle steps, and it is built around your own repeated measurement rather than around a single evaluation.
When there is no report at all
A substantial share of a private caseload arrives with nothing — no evaluation, a five-year-old evaluation, or a one-page school summary.
I.II.C requires that educational therapists "conduct an initial educational assessment/screening to inform their intervention plan." The plan follows assessment, and AET does not condition that on somebody else's report existing. What it does not authorise is filling the gap with instruments you are not trained on, which is II.I.C again.
The honest move when a family asks whether their child needs a full evaluation is II.II.J — facilitate the referral — plus a clear statement that you can begin instruction on what you can measure yourself while that process runs. What you cannot do is tell them whether an evaluation would produce a particular finding.
The intake mechanics are in How to Run a First Educational Therapy Session, and the scope boundaries of the role itself are mapped in What Is Educational Therapy? and in Educational Therapist vs. Learning Specialist vs. EF Coach.
The same boundary, drawn by the adjacent professions
Educational therapy is not the only discipline that reads other people's assessment data and has to say where its own judgement stops. Three neighbouring bodies have published on it, and reading their versions is the fastest way to see that the boundary is normal rather than a special constraint on educational therapists.
ASHA has a position statement on the Roles and Responsibilities of Speech-Language Pathologists With Respect to Reading and Writing in Children and Adolescents (2001). It lists "assessing reading and writing" among appropriate roles and then immediately qualifies it: "These roles are implemented in collaboration with others who have expertise in the development of written language and vary with settings and experience of those involved."
Competence is treated there as situational rather than as a property of the credential, which is worth noticing. ASHA's broader Scope of Practice in Speech-Language Pathology sets the outer boundary.
CEC — whose code AET's own Code of Ethics was originally adapted from in 1985 — states its position in the Special Education Professional Ethical Principles (January 2010) as "maintaining a high level of professional competence and integrity and exercising professional judgment" and "practicing collegially with others who are providing services to individuals with exceptionalities." Its practice standards elaborate.
AOTA publishes the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework, which is the document to reach for when a report recommends handwriting or sensory work and you need to know whose call that is.
NASP is the most directly relevant of the four, and its position statement on school psychologists' involvement in assessment (2016) describes an approach that is "multimethod, multisource, and multisetting." A single report is one method, one source, one setting.
Where those scopes collide over a shared construct is its own subject, and it is the next thing worth taking apart properly.
Where the published record runs out
Six things a practitioner would reasonably want settled, which no organisation has settled in print.
AET has not reconciled the Fact Sheet and II.I.D. The domain-boundary reading above is a reading. AET has published nothing that adopts it.
AET has no clause on receiving, storing or citing a third party's evaluation. The closest are II.I.I on confidentiality, III.II.G on consented information exchange, and II.I.M.4 on record retention, which defers to statute and sets no period of its own.
AET publishes no guidance on report literacy. There is no AET document defining a standard score, a confidence interval or an RPI, and no required coursework named on the Associate ET content list is specifically a measurement course, though two assessment courses are required.
No publisher names educational therapists in its qualification documentation. Pearson, PAR, MHS and Riverside all define user levels by degree, licensure, coursework or professional-body membership. None of the four names the role. We mapped that gap instrument by instrument in Achievement Test Qualification Levels.
The NASP protocol-release clause has no counterpart for private examiners. Standard II.5.1 binds school psychologists. A psychologist in private practice is governed by their own state board and their own association's code, and what they may release to you is not answered by NASP's document at all.
There is no published study of educational therapists' accuracy in reading psychoeducational reports. Not a gap anyone is obliged to fill, but worth knowing that the competence question here has never been measured.
The pattern is the one that keeps recurring across this field: the vocabulary is shared, the documents are public, and the seams between them have never been stitched. Knowing exactly where the seams are is most of the professional skill.
Frequently asked questions
Can an educational therapist interpret a psychoeducational evaluation?
AET publishes two documents that answer this differently. The Fact Sheet lists interpreting assessment results among educational therapists' skills, scoped to educational assessments they are qualified and trained to use.
Code of Ethics II.I.D directs them to seek interpretation of assessment data from professionals in related fields, naming medical, psychological, speech/language and neuropsychological. The reading that reconciles them is a boundary by instrument domain rather than by act, but AET has not published that reconciliation.
Can an educational therapist diagnose dyslexia from a report?
No. The AET Fact Sheet's DO NOT list begins with the single word "diagnose," with no qualifying parenthetical. NASP's 2020 Standard II.3.6 adds the measurement reason: no single test or measure is used to make broad determinations regarding disability identification or services needed.
How do I get the subtest scores when the school only gave me a composite?
Ask, with signed consent, under the information-exchange provision at AET III.II.G. The full subtest table is a routine release. If you need the completed test protocols themselves, NASP 2020 Standard II.5.1 makes it ethically permissible for a school psychologist to provide copies, at a parent's request, to a professional qualified to interpret them — so the request runs through the parent, not through you.
Should I use the grade equivalent score in a parent conversation?
Pearson's own published guidance says age and grade equivalents should not be used for making diagnostic or placement decisions, that they are not an interval or ratio scale and cannot be added, subtracted or averaged, and that standard scores are a more accurate representation. If a family raises a grade equivalent, explain what it actually represents rather than repeating it.
Is it safe to plan instruction from the pattern of subtest scores?
McGill, Dombrowski and Canivez (2018) found the evidence continues to support the recommendation against using cognitive profile analysis as a focal point for diagnostic and treatment decisions. The underlying reason is that the reliability of a difference between two correlated scores is always weaker than either score alone. Use the table to locate candidate skill weaknesses, then confirm them with your own measures.
Which score in a report is most useful for planning instruction?
Riverside's technical documentation argues that standard scores and percentile ranks show rank order, while the Relative Proficiency Index describes proficiency against grade-level tasks and the W score is the equal-interval metric designed to measure progress over time. For instructional planning and progress measurement, the proficiency and growth metrics answer the question; the percentile answers a different one.
Building a practice around work like this? Illuminate maintains a list for educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches — referrals, and occasional notes on the credential and practice landscape. Join the educator list.
Comments