The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

76 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT information and formulates responses. In addition to the scores that these measures generate, examiners also gain a great deal of information from how children approach and solve problems. Do they talk out loud when attempting to solve complex tasks? Do they work at their own pace, completing a task to the best of their ability? Are they impulsive in their responses (answering without weighing all possible options)? Do they experience difficulty with complex directions and instructions? Do they become anxious when they know they are being timed? Do they become overwhelmed when they perceive the task to be too great for them to accomplish? These are just a few of the questions that will be answered to gain an assess- ment of the child’s abilities. 3. Assessment of processing. While cognitive assessment is a thorough pro- cess that helps determine the strengths and weaknesses a child possesses, there are other measures that also help in filling out your child’s learning profile. These include speech and language pro- cessing, auditory processing and other forms of memory, attention, organization and visual-motor processing. 4. Assessment of academic function- ing . Achievement, or academic, assess- ment is carried out to assist in under- standing your child’s academic strengths and weaknesses. Tasks involving reading, writing, spelling and mathematics are assessed for general academic skill; in many instances, academic fluency and efficiency are also measured. Evaluators often supplement gen- eral academic measures if they see that Evaluation can also help students prepare for higher education by identifying the ways in which they learn most efficiently. O ne day in the summer of 2006, my husband came home from work and told me about an e-mail he had received from a fel- low Foreign Service officer. The officer asked my husband if I could provide speech therapy for his daughter if they came to post. The answer, of course, was yes. But what interested me was how this fam- ily had found me. Facing a move to a new post with a child who had recently been identified as needing speech therapy, this little girl’s mother had been scouring the world for professional assistance. I cannot imagine how much time she put into this search, but she must have perse- vered for many hours and days. Somehow she happened to read an old newsletter from Consulate General Monterrey. And in that particular newsletter she came upon my husband’s self-introduction, in which he mentioned that his wife was a speech pathologist. It seemed a difficult and haphazard approach to finding a speech pathologist, or any special education service for that matter. But I soon came to understand that this is typical of the kind of effort For- eign Service families with a child needing special education services have to undertake before every overseas posting. And it is even more complicated for families that need more than one type of special education provider. Sometimes appropriate local therapists and teachers are readily available. More often, a family finds some of what they need and patches together the rest, with help from a local teacher or thera- pist who is not a fluent speaker of English. Whatever the result, the approach is time-consuming, and completely “hit or miss.” The emerging field of telepractice may be the answer for Foreign Service families. Some FS families have already started using the Internet for educational purposes, but the idea of getting professional therapeutic or rehabilitative services online is new and may seem improbable. A product of the revolution in communications technology, tele- practice has only recently come into its own. The following is an over- view of this promising new area and a look at its potential to meet FS families’ needs. In addition to offering you a window into what online therapy actually looks like from my experience as a professional speech therapist and teleprovider, I hope to be able to answer some questions and inspire you to look into it for yourself. Erin Long is a speech-language pathologist and founder of Worldwide Speech. Her husband, Jeremy Long, joined the Foreign Service in 2005, and the couple has been posted to Mexico and Brazil. Her complete article is available online at afsa.org/educationarticles. From the FSJ Education Supplement June 2012 Telepractice: An Answer to the Special Ed Puzzle Overseas? BY ER I N LONG