Reading a psychological report: a guide for parents
What the sections mean, which sentences to trust, and the four questions worth asking before you act on any of it.
A report arrives, several pages long, with numbers, bands, graphs and paragraphs of description. Most parents read it once, take from it the single sentence that worried them most, and act on that. It is worth spending twenty minutes reading it properly instead, and the reading is not difficult once you know what each part is doing.
Start at the back
Find the section that names the instrument, the norm group and the date. It is usually in small type near the end, and it governs everything in front of it. You are looking for what the instrument is called, who it was standardised on, how many of them there were, and when. If your child does not resemble that group — a different country, a different language of schooling, a group assembled a generation ago — then every placement in the report is a comparison with people unlike your child, and should be read with that in mind.
The scores are positions, not marks
Percentiles and standard scores say where your child stands relative to that comparison group. They are not percentages of questions answered correctly, and a percentile in the middle of the range covers a great many children who are, for practical purposes, indistinguishable from one another. Two children fifteen percentile points apart in the middle of the distribution are usually much closer than the numbers make them look.
The shape matters more than the level
The genuinely useful information in most reports is not how high the scores are but how they sit relative to each other. Where does this child stand higher, and where lower, compared with their own average? That pattern is what a career conversation can use. The overall level is largely a restatement of what school reports already told you.
A caution attaches to this. Only differences large enough to exceed the measurement error should be read as differences at all. If the report gives a margin or a confidence band, use it. If two scores overlap within their bands, they are the same score, whatever the printed numbers suggest.
If the report ranks your child's abilities in a neat order from strongest to weakest, be sceptical. Real profiles have ties, and honest reports say so.
The prose is written by a machine or a person
Most reports contain descriptive paragraphs generated automatically from the score ranges. These are not wrong, but they are generic — the same paragraph appears for every child in that band, and it has no knowledge of your child. Read them as a starting point for discussion rather than as observations about your particular child, because that is what they are.
Where a qualified person has written an interpretation themselves, it will read differently: it will refer to specific patterns, note where the evidence is unclear, and often say what it cannot conclude. That section is worth more than the rest of the document combined.
Four questions before you act
- What is this report actually claiming, and what would have to be true for the claim to hold?
- Which statements are descriptions of measured performance, and which are predictions about the future? The second kind carries far more uncertainty than its wording suggests.
- Does anything here disagree with what we already know about this child from five years of school and home? Disagreement is not an error; it is the most interesting finding in the document and deserves a conversation.
- What would we do differently if this report did not exist? If the answer is nothing, the report has not yet earned the weight being placed on it.
And one thing not to do
Do not read the report to your child as a set of conclusions about them. A young person handed a printed judgement about their own mind will generally accept it, including the parts that are generic paragraphs and the parts that fall within measurement error. Sit with them and go through it as evidence to be examined — including the parts you would rather they did not see. A child who has been shown how to interrogate a report about themselves has learned something more durable than anything the report contains.
