Developmental Assessment

Patricia M. Sonksen. Developmental Assessment, Theory, Practice and Application to Neurodisability. A Practical Guide from Mac Keith Press, London, UK: Mac Keith Press; 2016, (320 pages). ISBN: 978–1-909962–56–9. £39.95

The cover of this volume shows an encouraging investigator of a child with a developmental delay assessing eye movements with a lure. Patricia Sonksen, a leader in the field of neurodevelopment and neurodisability with a special interest in severe visual impairment has a huge experience in sharing a new comprehensive way of looking at the different aspects of development.

The book is organized into 14 chapters. The first chapter gives a most helpful introduction to the developmental content of spontaneous behavior, test items, and responses. This is followed by a chapter with guidelines for establishing rapport and communicating with parents and child. The following nine chapters cover all aspects of development (such as vision, hearing, social cognition, nonsymbolic cognition, nonspoken symbolic development, spoken language, gross motor development, upper limb development, and speech sound production). The following chapter (Gathering domain assessments into a comprehensive whole) summarizes the main goal of the book “to provide the reader with a sound developmental knowledge base to be able to engage with the child in a structured and informed interaction that is assimilated and modulated as it progresses.” It further contains many most helpful investigation schedules for different ages from the age of 9 weeks up to the age of 48 months. The next chapter deals with the question, how to investigate children with developmental delays and/or disorders with severe single or multiple impairments. Many illustrative patient examples explain how to adapt the developmental assessment to assess the potential of the individual child. The final chapter concluded building up the skill to discuss findings with parents, how to “break the bad news,” and how to build up from there the confidence of the parents by recommending intervention strategies to achieve their child's developmental potential. Again, this is illustrated with many helpful examples of patients.

Each chapter contains many tables summarizing the content of different developmental aspects. Several challenging questions and patient exercises help to apply the newly learned developmental knowledge to deepen it, and “key points” at the end of each chapter summarize the most important facets of each developmental aspect. Broad reference lists at the end of each chapter provide further information.

I found reading this volume very informative. I fully agree with Dr. Jane Williams, who provided the Foreword, that this volume reflects her passion about the subject of developmental assessments for children with developmental und visual disability and her ability to transfer knowledge in a most skillful and didactic way. This book is indeed a comprehensive guide to carry out a developmental assessment in a standardized fashion. Patricia Sonksen is helping us to see more clearly how to do this. Therefore, I can highly recommend this book for professionals working in this field.