Objective
Pediatric neuropsychological evaluations are intended to support children in their development and ability to function successfully in their everyday settings; however, limited efforts have been made to synthesize the available literature regarding the utility of these evaluations. To improve the impact of pediatric neuropsychological evaluations, a systematic review was conducted to identify components of the assessment and feedback process that are associated with parents’ perception of helpfulness (help parent understand child), usefulness (provide actionable information/elicit change) and overall parent satisfaction.
Data Selection
We followed PRISMA guidelines to conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify research on parental perception of the utility of pediatric neuropsychological evaluations for children aged 3–21 years. We searched PubMed, PsychINFO, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science databases using the terms “neuropsychology,” “pediatric,” “neuropsychological evaluation,” “neurodevelopmental disorders,” “perceived utility,” and “parental utility.”
Data Synthesis
We identified 1,029 abstracts and after full review included 9 articles in our qualitative synthesis.
Conclusions
Parents generally reported high levels of satisfaction with their child’s evaluation. The research has also suggested that parents find evaluations and feedback helpful for understanding their child’s pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Recommendations from the neuropsychologists provided useful information for obtaining support and eliciting change. Limitations of the studies reviewed included small sample size, variability in methods, and reduced generalizability of results.
Cognitive impairment is a significant comorbidity in children with posterior fossa brain tumors. Several studies have found that the functional brain organization of bilinguals and monolinguals have distinct and shared sites that support language. This retrospective study aims to examine the posttreatment performance on language tasks of monolingual (N ¼ 9) and bilingual (N ¼ 11) children with medulloblastoma. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed examining verbal comprehension (VC), word reading (WR), and expressive (EV) and receptive vocabulary (RV) as outcomes. Age at diagnosis, age at testing, cerebellar mutism history, gender, and SES were predictors. Bilingualism was entered in Step 2 to examine DR 43, p , .05). A comparable pattern was found when predicting EV. The strongest predictors of WR were time since diagnosis (b ¼ -.60, p , .001), cerebellar mutism (b ¼ -.43, p , .01), and bilingualism (b ¼ 0.33, p , .05). The best outcomes were for monolinguals girls without cerebellar mutism who were assessed shortly after the end of treatment. As the age of second language acquisition is an important mediator in the development of language, neural tumors during critical periods of neurodevelopment may impose a negative influence on a child's language abilities.
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