Why does a child's assessment take so long at special education centers, and how can you shorten it without losing accuracy?

A specialist finishes an assessment session with a child before noon and walks back to her desk with a stack of forms. The longest part of the job starts now: scoring each item, adding up the totals, copying them onto the summary sheet, drawing the chart in the format the center uses, then writing up strengths and weaknesses. At most centers this happens between sessions, or at home in the evening.

Where does the time in a child's assessment actually go?

Most of it goes into what happens after the session. Time with the child is the part that needs the specialist's expertise. Scoring, totaling, copying and charting are clerical work that repeats in the same form for every child.

We saw this at Sawa Academy for special education before Enable 360. Filling in forms, scoring by hand, copying scores and drawing charts took up a large share of the specialists' time and was a real problem for the center. And the whole cycle comes back with every reassessment.

Why does manual scoring slow assessments down and cause errors?

Because a single score gets written down several times. It goes on the assessment form, then into the summary sheet, then onto the chart, then into the report. Every copy is a chance for a small mistake, and some tools have hundreds of items.

Comparing with the previous assessment adds more time. The specialist digs out the old paper file, lays the two sheets side by side and works out the difference by hand. If the specialist who ran the first assessment has since left the center, their handwritten notes can be hard to make sense of.

What should never be cut from a child's assessment?

Time with the child, and the specialist's judgment about what they see. Observing the child in more than one situation, trying again when the child is tired or distracted, and asking the parents what the child does at home are all part of accuracy, and none of them should be squeezed to save time.

The tool itself also has to match the version approved by its owner, with the same items and the same scoring method. A center that trims a form to make it shorter loses the ability to compare one assessment with the next. The time you can safely save is in the paperwork around the session.

How can you shorten assessments if you still work on paper?

Start by organizing everything around the session. These steps help any center, with or without a system:

• Keep one approved copy of the forms for each tool, so specialists are not each working from a different version.
• Put the materials for each assessment tool in its own box, so the start of the session is not spent hunting for them.
• Block scoring time in the specialist's schedule after each assessment, so it stops spilling into the evening.
• Use a spreadsheet with formulas to total the scores where you can. At the very least it cuts addition errors.
• Store every assessment result in one known place, so it is easy to find at reassessment.

These steps take some pressure off, but the copying between sheets remains. Once spreadsheets and scattered files pile up, you run into the problem we wrote about in when you outgrow Excel.

What changes when the assessment runs on a system?

The copying steps disappear. The specialist enters the child's response once, and the system calculates the scores as each answer goes in and draws the chart in a layout that looks like the approved paper form.

The result stays in the child's file, so a reassessment months later is compared with the previous one without anyone searching through drawers. The next step after assessment is the individual plan, and we explain how it is built from the results in the individual education plan.

How much assessment time did Sawa Academy save?

Measured before and after the system, assessment, reporting, plans and tracking at Sawa Academy became about 60% faster. Paper use dropped by about 99%, from around 150,000 sheets a year to under 1,000.

The academy follows 81 children with 65 staff on the same system. These numbers are specific to Sawa, and the result at any other center depends on how much manual work it was doing before. We described the child's full journey there in running a special education center without paper.

What should you ask before moving assessments to a digital system?

• Does it support the tools your specialists use today? Enable 360 supports nine tools, including all three parts of VB-MAPP, ABLLS, Carolina, M-CHAT and ELM.
• Do the tables and charts look like the paper forms your team already knows, or will specialists have to learn to read results a new way?
• Who is responsible for licensing each tool? With Enable 360, licensing sits with the center under its agreements with the tool owners.
• Does the system compare the current assessment with the previous one automatically?
• Where is the children's data hosted? Enable 360 complies with Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) and is hosted in Saudi Arabia.

You can read more on the Enable 360 page, and if your center needs a tool or module it does not cover, we build that through our custom software service. Tell us which assessment tools you use and how many children you assess each month, and we will tell you what makes sense to move onto the system first.

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Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.