COMPREHENSIVE EXAM

Comprehensive Exam

Comprehensive Exam

DSM IV

DSM-IV-TR facilitates communication and consultation across multiple settings. Mental health professionals in clinical settings use the manual for diagnostic decision making within a comprehensive evaluation to guide treatment planning and development, to communicate service need to third-party payers like insurance companies, and to improve communication with others who may work with the client such as physicians and teachers. Within school settings, the use of the DSM-IV-TR is limited and used in combination with educational categories derived from the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (American Psychiatric Association, 2004).

Eligibility for special educational programming is based on the presence of a special educational classification from IDEA such as “Other Health Impairment” or “Learning Disabilities.” For these two examples, one might find comparable symptom profiles within DSM-IV-TR under categories termed “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” and “Reading Disorder,” respectively. The lack of overlapping classifications and incompatible terminology creates difficulties in communication between professionals in the school and community settings that are not easily resolved. School personnel often consult this manual to improve understanding of children's social-emotional behavior in an effort to ultimately create learning environments that meet the child's mental health and academic needs.

Diagnostic definitions and procedures within the manual imply a close examination of biological, psychological, and ecological contributions to mental health functioning. Professionals use a multisource, multimethod assessment framework within this classification system. Specifically, data may be collected from multiple informants and settings to examine academic, social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties (American Psychiatric Association, 2006). In order to meet diagnostic definitions, symptoms and behaviors must typically persist across time and impair the functioning of the individual. A multiracial assessment system is used to help gather and organize this data to help make this determination.

The effective use of this manual requires considerable training and experience (APA, 2000). DSM-IV-TR will ultimately be improved upon as evidenced by the historical review of this classification system. Currently, the utility and acceptability of DSM far exceeds that of other published works in this area.

Piaget

For Piaget, knowledge, rather than consisting of images or representations, is built up through action on the world and through coming to know what can be done to aspects of the world. Acquiring knowledge through action begins in infancy with simple acts such as pushing and pulling, and continues throughout development, because, according to Piaget, even the most sophisticated forms of thought are interiorized actions, now carried out mentally. Knowledge is not innately preexisting within the child, nor does it arise solely from empirical experience with objects, such that this experience produces a simple copy of the object. Rather, the essential characteristic of Piaget's constructivism is that intelligence is constructed through the child's continuous interaction with the world (Piaget, 2005).

In this sense, Piaget considered his constructivism a third way that avoids the problems with both nativism and empiricism.

Central in describing the process of development are Piaget's concepts of scheme, assimilation, and accommodation. These concepts describe the functional relation between the individual and the world at any point in ...