Our purpose in designing a prescriptive screening process was to offer families a cost-effective path to help confirm if therapeutic interventions are warranted, as well as to guide parents and teachers on how to support development in areas identified at risk.

BrainTools Prescriptive Screening is an abbreviated version of an assessment and is directed towards confirming a child’s risk for language and academic delays. Identifying children who are at risk can trigger early intervention prior to the onset of learning challenges, which in turn, can prevent learning challenges from taking place. Our prescriptive screening protocols include the administration of selected standardized norm-referenced measures. The measures have been intentionally selected and organized by age and grade level and are reflective of compiled research findings on the clinical markers for various neurodevelopmental disorders such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Developmental Dyslexia.

Our pre-intervention baseline assessments are directed towards children who have had recent psychoeducational evaluations. Psychoeducational evaluation findings are mapped onto our Interdisciplinary Developmental Profile (IDP) and an assessment protocol is designed to supplement psychoeducational findings. Our findings are integrated with psychoeducational findings so that a targeted and individualized therapeutic intervention program can be created.

Our comprehensive assessments are directed towards children with no previous (or very dated) testing with psychology and or speech-language pathology. Our comprehensive assessments explore the interactions between speech, language, and academic development, as well as the underlying cognitive linguistic processes that are responsible for learning and integrating new information.

Speech sound disorders are a group of developmental disorders that are characterized by delayed acquisition of age-appropriate speech sounds, which impact a child’s ability to be understood by others. The type of speech production challenge a child is experiencing can also place a child at risk for oral language and literacy delays. Our speech interventions are grounded in an integrative framework and are designed to differentially treat speech production challenges (e.g., articulation, expressive phonology, developmental apraxia of speech) while simultaneously reducing a child’s risk for oral language and literacy delays.

Children with pre-literacy and early literacy delays struggle to acquire the foundational skills they need to succeed academically. Our pre-literacy and early literacy interventions are grounded in an integrative framework and are designed to establish the foundational skills that underlie reading fluency, reading comprehension, and written expression.

Over 30 years of research has solidly established that Oral Language skills set the foundation for reading and writing development. Oral language development is essential for learning and academic development and is highly predictive of academic achievement.
Our oral language interventions isolate, as well as integrate, the various components of language (phonology, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics) so that children acquire the language skills they need to learn and communicate effectively in and out of the classroom setting.

Children experience reading and writing challenges in various ways and for different reasons. Identifying a child’s unique developmental profile of written language skills (e.g., decoding, spelling, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression) at the word, sentence, and discourse level is tantamount for structuring interventions that specifically target each child’s unique profile.

Our written language interventions explicitly target written language skills, while simultaneously addressing the underlying linguistic (oral language) and executive (executive functions and skills) processes that may be contributing to a child’s written language delays.

Executive control processes, which include executive functions and executive skills, are a compilation of skills and abilities that, over time, support children’s ability to increasingly control their thoughts, behavior, and learning. The development of core executive control processes is predictive of success in school and in life, as well as correlated with mental health and therapeutic outcomes.

Strengthening executive control processes is at the heart of how BrainTools operates. Executive control strengths serve as protective factors and can decrease the symptomatology of a variety of neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention deficit disorders, developmental language disorders, and developmental dyslexia. In like manner, weaknesses in executive control processes are often at the root of a child’s learning challenges.

BrainTools Executive Function Model is based on over 20 years of research and development. The methodologies associated with our executive function model grounds all of our work with children and families.