Strategies for Success: Minimizing the Use of Cognitive Testing

Shortly after the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now IDEA), renowned community psychologist Seymour Sarason declared that school psychology was born into the prison of a test (Sarason, 1976). Nearly 50 years later, the situation remains largely unchanged, and many of us can safely diagnose ourselves with Stockholm Syndrome. Instead of heeding the red flags and invalidations indicated by decades of research, many have doubled down on IQ tests by adopting the principles and practices of neuro school psychology, where IQ sub-skills—attention, memory, language, executive functions, and sensory-motor skills—are explored in detail through increasingly extensive cognitive testing and interpretation (Fletcher et al., 2019; Reynolds & Fletcher-Janzen, 2009).