Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment "Simple Observations"

Could someone familiar with identifying children explain what the term means? What happens when someone comes to your child's school to do a "simple observation"?

Doesn't mean much of anything. You have to know what the purpose is, and what the plan is.

A serious observation should (IMO) involve the taking of data, both on the child being observed and on a few typical peers. (e.g. how many times out of seat in a 10 minute period.)

It sounds like a "fly on the wall" observation of behaviour as opposed to actively engineering a situation to provoke a response. For example during an autism assessment a psychologist could either sit in the corner and watch the child interact (simple observation) as opposed to say, sitting next to them and trying to establish eye contact or initiate a conversation.

Ditto DeeDee. Depends on the referral question.

In general, classroom observations should not involve the observer manipulating the environment. The observations can be recorded in a number of ways, though, such as a running record (the simplest form of observation), interval sampling (record the behavior occurring every 30", for example), frequency counts, observing specifically for antecedent-behavior-consequence behavioral sequences (usually focusing on predetermined target behaviors). If an experimenter is manipulating the environment, you usually need an additional observer to record the behavior (such as in an ADOS or ADOS-2 arena evaluation for autism).

And yes, in a naturalistic observation, ideally there should be comparison data of the same form taken on peers.