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From Symptoms to Strategies

 Parallel Assessment is not simply a model for observing and evaluating individual traits or isolated skills in a child with developmental delays. It is a holistic, systems-oriented, flexible and adaptive framework that recognizes the child as a dynamic, integrated being. A person whose development is shaped by a complex web of internal and external influences.

This model gives equal attention to the child and to the adults who nurture and mediate the child’s learning development: parents, caregivers, teachers and therapists. It offers practical guidelines for setting priorities, selecting strategies and modifying developmental plans and strategies in real time.

At its core Parallel Assessment seeks a deeper understanding of both the child and their mediators. This includes identifying how to improve interpersonal connectedness, two-way communication, the adult’s current ways of connecting and instructing, and the child’s and their mediator’s current approaches to learning and to learning how to learn.

Developmental support is not static. Feedback and adaptations can be made even within the current activity to ensure continual alignment between instruction and the child’s evolving needs, and the current and future goals of the child and of the child’s development team.

Recognizing the Interactive Functional Systems Within and Between Domains

Traditional assessments often target a single problem or skill, e.g. hearing, attention, language, motor planning, memory, problem-solving, fear, behavior problems, as if each situation stands alone in a vacuum. The Parallel Assessment model involves a broader focus and moves beyond fragmentation and reductionism.

Auditory Processing in Context: Interconnected Challenges

As an example, auditory processing difficulties are often misunderstood as strictly sensory issues, affecting only a child’s ability to detect or differentiate sounds. In reality, they are frequently interdependent with a wide range of interactive developmental domains and contextual influences. Within the Parallel Assessment model, challenges are never viewed in isolation, but instead as entry points into a larger, highly integrated global developmental workspace.  A child who does not respond well to verbal cues may not only be challenged in their auditory perceptions but may also be anxious or distracted.

The child with auditory processing issues may also be feeling unwell, tired, distracted, or overstimulated by noise in the environment. Parallel Assessment steps out of the box and explores any issue or context or developmental domains that may affect, or be affected by, this child’s difficulties with auditory processing: their personal experiences and learning history, their differing environments and contexts, their current and previous mediators and mediation, and possible issues involving their sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional, communicative and social development.

A child who seems not to respond when spoken to may struggle with processing rapid sequences of sounds or distinguishing between similar phonemes. But this challenge may also be influenced by motor planning issues that affect their ability to orient toward sound, working memory limitations that make it difficult to retain what was just said, or attentional variability that prevents sustained auditory focus. The child may also be navigating emotional regulation difficulties, perhaps they are anxious in social settings, or were unsuccessful in communicating their thoughts and feelings.

Auditory processing difficulties often overlap with visual-perceptual and social-cognitive challenges. Children may miss important information because they do not integrate sound with facial expressions, gestures, or contextual cues, including where others are looking. The child may have difficulties formulating the other person’s intentions or meanings. These can impair not only auditory processing and comprehension but also the development of joint attention, shared meaning and the foundations of conversation.

The implications cascade across multiple domains:

Language Development: Delayed auditory processing can inhibit vocabulary growth, syntactic understanding and expressive language use.

Social Interaction: Mishearing or misinterpreting verbal cues can lead to issues during play, peer engagement or classroom participation.

Cognitive Development: Problems with auditory sequencing can create difficulties with multi-step directions or solving problems that rely on language.

Emotional Regulation: Gaps and distortions in sensory input and/or processing may cause the child to misunderstand, to be confused, frustrated, anxious. Their confusion and fragile self-confidence may cause them to withdraw, to appear inattentive, or to act out, not because of defiance, but because of stress, misperception, misunderstanding, repeated errors, communicative overload, criticism and devaluation.

Parallel Assessment

Parallel Assessment helps to untangle these layers by analyzing not just what a child is struggling with, but how, when, and under what conditions these struggles occur. By working in real time with the child and their mediators this model seeks to identify: whether comprehension improves when visual support is added, how the child responds when stress is lowered or motivation is increased, what role does the pacing, tone, and context of adult speech play in the child’s processing success, would low-gain hearing aids be helpful even if there is no measurable hearing loss? Would interventions targeting issues in other domains help improve auditory processing issues be helpful? Would auditory training methods be helpful for this particular child? Which ones?

Parallel Assessment becomes a tool not only for revealing barriers but for identifying points of entry where positive, individualized change can be initiated. We learn not just what the child cannot yet do, but how we can help them access the world more fully, using every available sense, every human relationship and every opportunity for mediated learning.

The assessment does not end there. We also step beyond the individual and explore the environmental systems: prior learning histories, familial beliefs, classroom norms, medical histories, socio-cultural contexts and moment-to-moment relational dynamics. We ask, What is the child’s embodied state today? How have their experiences, physiological, neurological, psychological, social, and historical, affected their capacity to interpret and respond to their world? And where, when and how should we engage, guide and support?

Theoretical Influences on Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development

Some of the pioneering figures influencing our integrative, dynamic view include Kurt Goldstein and Oliver Sacks, who saw each individual as a whole person in context, not merely a collection of symptoms. And Lev Vygotsky, who viewed development as a socially mediated process shaped by history, culture and interpersonal scaffolding. Reuven Feuerstein’s insistence that human intelligence and development are not fixed traits but are states that can be significantly enhanced through intentional, meaningful and reciprocal interactions with a skilled mediator. Alexander Luria, who examined the dynamic interactions of brain systems and psychological functions. Urie Bronfenbrenner, whose ecological systems theory explained how development is affected by nested environmental systems.

Parallel Assessment operates at the intersection of these ideas, informed by neurodevelopmental science, systems theory and lived clinical and educational experience. It embodies a belief in plasticity, potential, and the power of ongoing nurture, understanding and kind interpersonal connections and communications; and the necessity of daily coordinated and collaborative mediated relationships and shared learning activities to mediate growth in the child and in the child’s adult mediators.

Some Examples of Interrelated Challenges

A child with language delay may also struggle with working memory and with motor planning for speech and turn-taking in social settings.

A child with sensory integration challenges may also experience emotional dysregulation, poor self-awareness and resistance to new learning environments.

A child with attentional difficulties may also show poor impulse control, weak auditory processing and difficulty understanding peer cues in group play.

A challenge in one domain reverberates across others. Intervention must address the interconnected whole, not simply the isolated presenting symptom.

Developmental Systems and Mediated Learning Continually Change and Evolve

Parallel Assessment is not merely diagnostic. It is transformative. It informs how to instruct, when to mediate, what to prioritize and why a particular strategy may work for this unique child. It equips parents, caregivers and professionals with direction and guidance toward building trust through devoted, empathic, responsive learning and play relationships; promoting interesting and relevant two-way, reciprocal communication; designing meaningful, real-world play and mediated learning experiences; adjusting goals as the child and environment change, fostering a sense of agency, mastery, and joy in learning, and importantly, in nurturing and instructing.

This approach is not about fixing a child. It is about discovering who they are, how they can grow, and what their unique system of support and prerequisites should look like to help them connect, communicate, solve problems, and thrive in real life, today and in the future.  

Parallel Assessment not only assesses strengths and difficulties, but to see, to listen, to connect authentically, to uncover and to shape higher competencies, to plan, to evaluate progress and to enhance believe in the child, in ourselves, and to recognize the ever-expanding capacities of our shared development.

*What I term the “global developmental workspace” is analogous in many ways to the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011).

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