The psycho-educational program is a clinical treatment program, which…
1. Accurately measures one’s cognitive/intellectual/academic/linguistic/emotional behavioral/ neuropsychological functioning,
2. Provides a key for psychotherapy to treat emotional behavioral problems,
3. Finds out the problems that have delayed learning and language development,
4. Researches and analyzes these problems, and
5. Develops treatment strategies sequentially to start treatment.
6. The most important factor in the treatment process is the parents’ full understanding of and engagement in the treatment goals.
The Active Learning psycho-educational program is an open-class system that invites the parents to observe their child’s behaviors and progress together with the clinician and to learn how a psycho-educational strategy works.
The Active Learning psycho-educational program has two great differences that other educational institutions do not have. First, this program runs on the basis of clinical treatment. All participants are required to undergo the initial diagnostic interview and the Comprehensive Psycho-educational Evaluation to accurately measure their current states of cognitive/intellectual/academic/linguistic/emotional/behavioral/neuropsychological functioning. The assessment data from these measures helps to identify the functionality of all developmental areas of a child, and makes an accurate diagnosis.
For instance, some of children who have trouble acquiring the English language do equip with normal range of Korean verbal comprehension ability but have shown significant impairment in the areas of short-term memory, oral language abilities, including comprehension and oral expression. Those impairments often lead to emotional behavioral disorders and are exacerbated by ineffective parenting issues at home. In such case, where emotional behavioral problems and problems with the linguistic areas in the brain occur simultaneously with learning delays, the general teaching and learning approach used at regular schools, private tutoring or academies (e.g. hagwons) are less effective at meeting the special needs of those children and often lead them to lose interest in the classroom.
We have seen many cases where children have received private tutoring and studied at private academies (e.g. hagwons) for a long time before coming to our clinic. But they could hardly achieve learning progress and developed negative/defiant characters, only growing conflicts with their parents. Children who fall under these cases need a specially designed psycho-educational treatment; however, all they have experienced was a coercive style of learning where they always felt overwhelmed and could not have the true learning experience.
Our psycho-educational treatment program is designed to research and analyze emotional behavioral problems and additional hurdles that children experience. Based on such research, the treatment strategies are developed. Particularly, a child’s emotional behavioral state is closely related to how his or her parents treat their child at home, so parent participation in the clinical treatment process is essential.
A psycho-educational treatment program is usually needed for children who suffer from delayed language development, problems with English language acquisition, stress due to cultural/linguistic adjustment, specific learning disorders, ADHD symptoms, conduct disorders, depression, or anxiety as well as those with a diagnostic clinical condition, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and intellectual disability. By treating these symptoms with behavioral treatment, ineffective learning behaviors are modified, problems that have caused delays in learning and language development are analyzed with scientific procedures, and treatment strategies are established to promote learning.
This whole treatment procedure and strategy should not be formalized to make it applicable to the other children because of the nature of individual differences of their impairment range and intensity. Each individual child is required to have uniquely developed treatment goals and strategies. Dr. Cho and his team of experts are dedicated to improving a child’s clinical and learning difficulties through this process.
In order to successfully proceed with the program, there are a few things which parents and guardians must keep in mind. Our psycho-educational program is not intended to raise school grades in a short period of time. It is a clinical and research-oriented program for a primary focus of TREATMENT of the child’s various impaired condition. It helps identify the factors that have deterred a child’s language/cognitive/intellectual development and treats these problems with clinical psycho-therapeutic skills and by utilizing some of general learning materials. Observing the child’s problems and progress together, parents are required to fully partake in the treatment process.
Our psycho-educational clinicians reinforce the positive clinical and learning behaviors according to the behavioral treatment goals for each developmental area and strive to achieve these goals one by one. This is the very difference with which our program is featured from the repetitive drills or unindividualized learning curriculum often done at private tutoring and academies.
