What is involved?

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Every child needs an initial eye examination to determine how well they can see and maintain clear vision. If your child is having difficulty with learning, an additional appointment may be scheduled for a visual information processing assessment. This test takes approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour with a Behavioural optometrist.

 

Visual Information Assessment - Your child is asked by your Behavioural optometrist to complete individual tasks in the following areas:

 

 

Eye movement skills 
These skills are needed in order for a child to keep their position on a page, copy from the board and read fluently. They also assist with general co-ordination.

 

Visual spatial skills 
Good visual spatial skills start with a child's awareness of them self in space, their left-right awareness, awareness of external objects, and finally of the printed page. Without this knowledge, children will often reverse letters, numbers and words and show poor page organisation.

 

Visual memory 
These skills allow a child to immediately recognise a word. Children with poor visual memory will often act as if it is the first time they have come across a word, even if they have come in contact with the word hundreds of times before.

 

Visual analysis 
Allows a child to 'make sense' of visually presented information. Without this ability, children will struggle to appreciate subtle differences between letters, numbers and words, which impairs comprehension.

 

Visual discrimination

This is our ability to discern small differences between the things we see. This skill is very important in letter, number and able word recognition. 

 

Figure ground

We use our figure ground skills every time we search for something in our environment. The more cluttered the background, the more difficult it is to locate the object we seek. Figure ground skills are used when reading, when searching for words and in a classroom situation.

 

Visual motor integration 
Handwriting requires a child to make a mental plan of the letters and words (utilises visual analysis skills) then use fine motor skills (pen control) to execute this plan. Children with poor visual motor integration will tend to have slow or messy handwriting or poor page organisation.

 

Auditory skills 
Although not a focus of our testing, it is important to get a baseline measurement to obtain an overall picture of your child's learning style. Good auditory skills allow for a child to sound out unfamiliar words, retain verbal information and understand information sequencing. This helps with reading, writing, and mathematical and musical ability.