If the term AEPS sounds foreign to you and you’d like some answers, now, please, quickly – well, not to worry, we’ve got them right here. In this article, we’ll be going through:
- What AEPS is
- How AEPS is carried out
- What are its benefits
- How AEPS can be used to support a student.
Alright? Fantastic! Let’s get into it.
What is AEPS?
AEPS stands for Assessment, Evaluation and Programming System. Simply put, it’s a standardized assessment that is able to evaluate the progress of children with disabilities, from birth to age six. Often, special needs educators, as well as therapists, make use of AEPS as a tool to determine the abilities and progress of a child with special needs.
Think of it as a kind of assessment tool to gauge your child’s developmental level. Just as how a spelling test could give a glimpse into a child’s literary skill, AEPS is a tool that checks on your kid’s developmental progress. In fact, there are 8 specific areas that AEPS checks for:
- Fine motor skills – like reading or writing
- Gross motor skills – like running or climbing
- Adaptive skills – self-care tasks, like dressing or toileting
- Social-emotional
- Social-communication
- Cognitive
- Literacy
- Math
Progress in these areas can be hard to measure objectively. Hence, AEPS introduces a scoring system to keep everything standardised and to better understand exactly where your child is in terms of a certain developmental area. This way, it’s clearer what and how your kid can be helped.
This scoring system has been carefully researched and consistently revised. It’s a credible system backed by many scientists, so there’s no need to worry about the results being ‘skewed’ or non-objective.
AEPS’ scoring system
Simply put, each developmental area is assessed by having a child do several related tasks. For example, a child’s ability to kick a ball could be one of the measurements assessed to check the development of their gross motor skill. The scoring system is quite intuitive:
- 0: no performance (the child did not kick the ball, even after prompting)
- 1: emerging performance (the child kicked the ball with some prompting)
- 2: Mastery performance (the child kicked the ball with only a verbal cue)
The third edition of AEPS introduces an even more precise scoring system: For example, 1A represents emerging performance with assistance (the child kicked the ball after a physical demonstration). 1I represents an incomplete task (the child aimed a kick, but missed the ball). 1A1 represents an incomplete task with assistance (the child was given a physical demonstration, aimed a kick, but missed the ball.)
Should you have more questions on how the third edition of AEPS works, they can be answered in this helpful FAQ by Brooks Publishing.
How is AEPS carried out?
ONE Intervention has previously detailed how AEPS is carried out at our centre (you can find it here!) but we’ll go through a quick refresher.
Assessment
This step is pretty straightforward. The child psychologist assesses the child with AEPS, asking the child to perform a series of tasks and scoring them accordingly. Beyond just the AEPS assessment, it’s quite typical for the child psychologist to also ask for the caregiver’s input on the child’s day-to-day behaviour.
Evaluation
Then, the child psychologist consolidates the data that they’ve gathered from AEPS. They’ll analyse the data to figure out what areas they can best support your child in. This is so that the approach to help your child can be tailored exactly according to your child’s needs, which is definitely more effective than a generic one-size-fits-all approach.
Programming
This is where you come in to support your child. The child psychologist will use the information from AEPS – that is, your kid’s developmental strengths and which areas they can improve in – to make an individualised education plan.
This is basically a personalised support plan to help your child grow in their developmental journey. The child psychologist will present to you specific goals and intervention strategies based on their expert opinion. Ask them any questions you have, and listen closely for how to best support your kid.
Progress monitoring
After the individualised education plan is implemented, it only makes sense that we follow up on it. So, in this step, the child psychologist will work with you to figure out if the proposed plan is effective. If it’s not, they’ll make adjustments so the plan can better suit your child’s individual needs.
What are the benefits of AEPS?
Collects essential assessment data
One of the main reasons why AEPS is so effective is because it can clearly track a child’s progress. In the first place, a child’s developmental level can be a pretty abstract idea to grasp because each kid develops at a pace unique to them. This can make it difficult to determine when a developmental pace is unusual for a kid.
AEPS takes this into account and works out a scoring system that’s able to tangibly quantify a child’s progress. Hence, it’s a great tool to collect essential assessment data.
Supports holistic development
From the data collected, the child psychologists can then work out the individualised education programme. This makes sure that the intervention approach for your kid is specifically tailored to their holistic needs. For example, AEPS can help determine that your child may have perfectly adequate motor skills, but they might be struggling in terms of adaptive skills.
The child psychologist can then come up with an individualised education programme specifically tailored to help your child progress in their adaptive skills. This would be a lot more effective than using a generic intervention approach that targets eight developmental areas equally, because some developmental areas might just need more help than others.
Tracks progress effectively
Since AEPS quantifies its scoring system, it’s clear when your child is making progress. Thus, the individualised education plan can be adjusted as and when is needed in a timely manner. This ensures that your kid gets the maximum amount of support needed, when they need it.
How can AEPS be used to support a student?
Okay. So AEPS is a reliable and comprehensive assessment tool. But how can it be used practically? There are many ways, of course, but here are just a few concrete ideas of how your child psychologist might use AEPS to support your kid.
Check for school readiness
AEPS can tangibly determine whether or not your child is suited for the rigid academic curriculum in school. If a child is sent to a mainstream school without quite meeting the developmental level that said mainstream school is tailored to, the child might struggle to perform. AEPS helps to check whether or not your kid is ready to face that kind of school environment, and how to best support them in doing so.
Early intervention
Since the third edition of AEPS can assess children from birth up to six years old, it’s a valuable tool in early intervention. Early detection of developmental delays can allow for prompt intervention – the earlier the intervention, the more effective it can be. And in the long run, this can help support your child mentally and physically.
Develop effective teaching strategies
As mentioned earlier, AEPS clearly defines which developmental areas your child can improve in. Hence, your child psychologist can develop an effective teaching strategy that targets those specific areas. This makes AEPS a very useful gauge tool for a child psychologist when planning out your kid’s intervention and taking concrete steps to support their holistic level.
We hope that’s cleared things up a little! And if you’ve got any more questions on AEPS, feel free to drop us a comment below – we’d love to hear from you 💬👇
