Contact Marcus, our wonderful office manager, at team@pascualvaca.com or call him at 202.537.6155

We are always here to support you and encourage you to schedule follow-up sessions to make sure that you and your child have benefited from the evaluation results and our recommendations. We are also happy to communicate our results to other professionals and participate in school meetings and IEP/504 meetings.

Our office is a welcoming place where our families feel very comfortable. We are exceptionally dedicated to our families and consider your child our guest of honor. We allocate more time than needed for the actual testing to make sure your child feels comfortable in the new setting and can enjoy our play spaces and overall experience.

We recommend being as specific as you can when describing the evaluation to your child. For instance, if your child complains about doing homework, you can say that we are doing an evaluation to see why homework is difficult and what you and the teachers can do to help. You can also ask them what they would like to learn from the process, as many children know what is difficult for them. Including them in the process will result in greater involvement, a sense of empowerment, and self-advocacy.

If you want to be more general, you can also tell your child that we are doing an evaluation to learn more about them (e.g., how they learn, what is easier and more difficult for them at school, how they are feeling) and how you and the teachers can help.

We recommend that you tell your child that we will be doing thinking and academic tasks and activities. We will also ask them to complete questionnaires to learn about their perspective.

We complete the testing of school-age children in two sessions (typically from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.) and see younger children for three testing sessions (usually from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.). When working with young children, we ask that you stay in our office during the sessions. You can bring your computer and work in our waiting room.

When working with older children, feel free to drop them off and leave the office once they have settled. We give them a lunch break from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. and ask that you take them out for lunch to one of the cafes or restaurants near our office. This will give them an opportunity to refresh their mind, and you may learn a few things about what we completed in the morning.

First, we meet with you for an intake interview (for approximately 1 hour) to review your child’s history and any questions you want to address during the evaluation.

Then, we meet with your child for the actual testing sessions. For students ages 8 to adult, we schedule two days of testing and, when evaluating younger children, we divide the testing into three sessions. We also talk to other professionals working with your child and send you and your child’s teachers a set of behavioral questionnaires to learn about your child’s performance across school and home settings.

In addition to the feedback you receive during the sessions, we schedule a separate feedback session at the end of the evaluation to review the results (approximately 1 hour). We will give your child feedback during the testing sessions and sometimes schedule a separate session (approximately 30 minutes) to review our findings.

Finally, we will prepare a written report summarizing our results and including recommendations for home and school settings.

We call our evaluations Real-Time Neuropsychological Evaluations™ because we give you and your child feedback throughout the sessions. To accomplish this, we work in teams of two, formed by a neuropsychologist and a master’s level psychology associate. Working as a team allows us an opportunity to both score and give you and your child feedback during the testing sessions. It also helps us adjust the process to your child’s needs since we can select specific measures based on our results.

We typically work with school-age children. For our preschoolers, we do not recommend a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. However, if you have questions about your child’s development and behavior (e.g., language, attention, emotional regulation), we do an abbreviated assessment for early intervention purposes.

The purpose of an evaluation is to gain a deeper understanding of your child. In an evaluation, we include measures of intelligence, specific cognitive abilities (e.g., attention, language, memory, visuospatial and visuomotor skills), academic achievement, and socioemotional functions. We use the information derived from these measures to understand your child’s performance relative to same-age peers and identify any support he/she/they may need. The results are sometimes used to derive a specific diagnosis.

Neuropsychological evaluations assess specific cognitive functions in addition to intellectual, academic, and behavioral/emotional functioning. A neuropsychological evaluation is more comprehensive than a psychoeducational evaluation and will give you a more in-depth understanding of your child’s profile.