Assessing Children and Adolescents: Effective Screening and Identification

Autism | ADHD | Anxiety Disorders | Attachment Issues

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Reflect on this webinar

Complete these self-reflection questions and we will email them to you so you have a timestamp and evidence of completion.
This is where we will send a copy of the responses.
The webinar recommended starting with a broad screener (like the SDQ or PSC-17) to name the domain, then stepping down to a specific measure (such as the Spence, RCADS, or Vanderbilt). How does this compare with the way you currently choose assessment tools, and what might you do differently?
The presenters described disagreement between parent, teacher, and self-report as meaningful clinical information rather than noise. Thinking of a recent case with conflicting reports, what might those discrepancies have been telling you, and how might you interpret them now?
What surprised you most in this session? For example, the now-recognised co-occurrence of ADHD and autism, how the informant you weight most shifts with a child's age, or the limits of what a screener can and cannot tell you.
Name one tool discussed today (for example the SDQ, Spence, RCADS, PSC-17, Vanderbilt, or CCQ) that you plan to introduce or use differently. What is your first step to putting it into practice?

Workshop Summary

Assessing children and adolescents is uniquely challenging. Presenting concerns often overlap, co-occur, or shift across contexts; parent, teacher and self-report accounts frequently diverge; and the landscape of available screening tools is broad but uneven in quality. This webinar equips clinicians working with young people with practical frameworks for when to screen, what to use, and how to interpret the results in real clinical practice.

Assessing Children and Adolescents: Effective Screening and Identification webinar with Dr Jane Wotherspoon and Dr David Hegarty

Presenters Dr Jane Wotherspoon and Dr David Hegarty will explore:

  • When screening is indicated
  • How broad screeners and domain-specific measures serve different clinical purposes
  • How parent, teacher, and self-report measures complement clinical observation
  • Navigating discrepancy between informants — what it means clinically and how to interpret it
  • Strengths and limitations of current evidence-based psychometric tools
  • Implications of recent shifts in diagnostic thinking, including the now-recognised co-occurrence of ADHD and autism

KEY PRESENTATIONS COVERED

Autism | ADHD | Anxiety Disorders | Attachment Issues

PSYCHOMETRIC TOOLS EXPLORED

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) | Vanderbilt ADHD Rating Scale | Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) | Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) | Pediatric Symptom Checklist-17 | Composite Caregiving Questionnaire (CCQ)

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

  • Determine when screening is indicated and select appropriate tools for presenting concerns
  • Distinguish the clinical purposes of broad screeners versus domain-specific measures
  • Interpret and integrate multi-informant data, including when reports diverge
  • Critically evaluate the clinical utility, strengths and limitations of key child-focused psychometric measures
  • Apply evidence-based assessment practices and contemporary diagnostic thinking to screening decisions to improve diagnostic accuracy

Dr Jane Wotherspoon

Dr Jane Wotherspoon profile photo

Dr Jane Wotherspoon is a Clinical and Educational & Developmental Psychologist with a background in psychological assessment across clinical and research settings. Her work focuses on understanding individual neurodevelopmental profiles through a collaborative assessment process, with an emphasis on supporting clients and families to develop a meaningful understanding of their own strengths and challenges.

Jane has particular interests in cognitive and academic assessment, and in supporting psychologists to deliver high-quality, accessible services. She is especially focused on approaches that make assessment findings usable and relevant to everyday contexts, including for children, families, and schools.

In her role with NovoPsych, Jane contributes to scale development and to the ethical and effective integration of technology into clinical practice, with a focus on supporting clinicians while maintaining the integrity and usefulness of assessment outcomes.

Dr David Hegarty

Dr David Hegarty profile photo

Dr David Hegarty is a Registered Psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with children, teachers, and families as both an educator and a school psychologist. His career has included roles as a teacher, academic coordinator, and school psychologist across many schools, as well as private child and adolescent practice. His postgraduate training at the University of Sydney, including a Master of Health Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology and a PhD in computerised adaptive cognitive training, bridges direct experience with young people and a deep technical grounding in measurement and statistics.

David has particular interests in the development and validation of psychometric tools, and in the statistical foundations that determine how confidently a score can inform clinical decisions. He is especially focused on helping clinicians interpret assessment data with young people so that findings translate into usable, evidence-based decisions.

In his role as Head of Psychometrics at NovoPsych, and as an Adjunct Professional Fellow at Southern Cross University, David oversees scale development and contributes to the statistical methods behind the platform’s assessment tools. His focus is on keeping the measures clinicians rely on grounded in rigorous science while remaining accessible, interpretable, and clinically useful.

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