Melissa Neff

speaker

1,584 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2017 last heard Dec 2022

Melissa Neff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children · TPP 060a: A Deep Dive Into Assessments, Diagnoses, and Labels, with Melissa Neff, PhD · 2 Dec 2022 podcast

And all of our tests really do have objective scoring systems, but there's always a person behind that objective scoring system.

Uh uh.

And so what we do here in Missoula, I actually don't do

the ADOS because I'm a private practitioner working alone and I know you can do it on your own.

But we have in our town more of a team approach to that where they have um a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, and a psychologist in the room with the child.

And all of them are going together to do the scoring so that it's not just one person doing the scoring.

It's three people who are trying to score based on the objective, you know, sort of outlined criteria for how we're supposed to score a test.

So that I think gives more what we call convergent validity, like a lot of different people agreeing on the same thing.

But you are never supposed to base a diagnosis on just one test.

So I would say so much of what's important of the testing process is not only these validated tests, but getting information from the parent or guardian, information from the teacher.

Observation is really important.

Sometimes I will go and I will observe these kiddos at school in class in kind of a structured setting and then I'll observe them at recess.

Is anybody playing with them?

Are they playing alone?

Are they engaged in a repetitive behavior on the swing and they won't get off?

So there's so much information I think in observing the child outside of some of these objective tests as well.

you know, the key to a lot of things and to look for data that goes together.

And if you have data that's all over the place, like the teacher says, Oh my gosh, this this kid's just defiant.

And they test the kid and he's got really severe dyslexia.

So I think it's easy for sort of these things to miscue or sort of look one way when actually there's a whole lot going on.

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