What Makes a Psychological Report Useful? What Parents and Teachers Say

Research with parents and teachers found that a useful report is short, answers what matters, what it means and what to do next, and gives five to nine prioritised recommendations. Here is what the evidence says, and what to ask for in your own child's report.

A useful psychological report is one to eight pages long, leads with key findings rather than history, explains scores in plain language, and ends with five to nine prioritised, specific recommendations. That is not our opinion. It is what parents and teachers said when researchers asked them (Quinlan et al., 2026).

A new practice guide from the University of Tasmania sets out what makes reports usable in the settings where they actually get read, meaning a kitchen table, a learning support meeting, or a teacher's ten minutes between classes. It is written for psychologists, but it is just as useful to families commissioning an assessment, because it tells you what to ask for.

The research behind it

The guide draws on a mixed-methods study with parents and teachers, made up of an online survey of 112 participants, interviews and focus groups with 18, and a direct comparison of a conventional technical report format against a modified plain-language version (Quinlan et al., 2026).

The length finding was stark. Of those surveyed, 90.1% preferred reports of one to eight pages, and only 2.7% preferred reports of sixteen pages or more (Quinlan et al., 2026). One teacher put it plainly, saying "I do not have time to read 30 pages per student".

The three questions a report has to answer

The guide's central framing is that a tired, busy reader should be able to answer three questions quickly (Quinlan et al., 2026):

• What matters most?
• What does it mean, in everyday terms?
• What do we do next, in this real context?

Anything in the report that does not serve one of those three has to justify its place. The guide suggests a test for every section, which is whether it will change what the reader does next week. If not, it belongs in an appendix.

The six principles

1. Right-size the report and layer the detail

Keep the core report short and move technical material to appendices. The guide recommends one to eight pages for the body, with pages one and two carrying the key messages and top recommendations, later pages carrying a brief synthesis and functional impacts, and appendices holding score tables, diagnostic criteria and extended history (Quinlan et al., 2026).

It also warns against audience creep. A report trying to serve parents, teachers, a paediatrician and the NDIA at once usually serves none of them well, and a one-page summary written for a specific audience often works better. Diagnostic criteria are a good example of material to move. The DSM-5-TR criteria a diagnosis rests on (American Psychiatric Association, 2022) matter for accountability, but they belong in an appendix rather than in the first two pages.

2. Design for scanning

Most people scan before they read. Key findings belong on page one, before background and test detail. Recommendations should be grouped by functional need, such as reading and spelling, rather than by which test produced them (Quinlan et al., 2026).

3. Reduce cognitive and emotional load

Reports are usually read under stress. That means plain language first and technical detail later, key terms explained once and simply, short sentences, and a tone that treats the emotional weight of the document as expected rather than exceptional (Quinlan et al., 2026).

Psychometric language is a particular problem. Standard scores, percentiles and confidence intervals are not common knowledge, and a report that uses them without explanation sends families to Google.

4. Represent the whole child

Families and teachers need to recognise the child in the document, not just a diagnosis or a score profile. That means strengths named alongside needs and in the same section rather than buried at the end, person-centred and non-blaming language, and context about when something is hard and what helps (Quinlan et al., 2026).

The guide also notes something worth sitting with, from a teacher, which is that these children will potentially read these reports one day.

5. Make recommendations actionable

A good recommendation is specific enough that someone could start tomorrow. The guide's formula is action, plus who, plus when, plus an example, with worked examples for at least two or three of the key recommendations (Quinlan et al., 2026).

What it warns against is the vocabulary of vagueness, words like consider, support and monitor with no concrete action attached. Also recommendations that assume resources the setting does not have.

6. Prioritise, and be realistic about capacity

If everything is important, nothing is. The guide recommends about five to nine recommendations in total, arranged in tiers. Start here covers the top three with the highest impact and lowest burden, next covers another two to four if capacity allows, and later or optional covers specialist and longer-term options (Quinlan et al., 2026).

It also asks psychologists to state feasibility assumptions plainly, and to offer a scaled alternative when the ideal is not available. Long undifferentiated lists produce paralysis and guilt rather than action.

What to ask for, as a parent

The guide includes a usefulness checklist for psychologists. Turned around, it is a reasonable set of questions to ask before you commission an assessment.

• How long is the report, and does the first page stand alone?
• Will the key findings come before the background and test detail?
• Will scores be explained in plain language, including what a confidence interval means?
• Will my child's strengths appear alongside their difficulties?
• How many recommendations will there be, and will they be prioritised?
• Will each recommendation say who does it, when, and what it looks like in practice?
• Will you talk to the school, and will the recommendations be written so the learning support team can act on them?

A practice that has clear answers to those is one that has thought about what happens to the report after it is handed over.

How we write ours

We write reports to be used, which means classroom-level and home-level recommendations rather than only diagnostic language, and a document the school's learning support team can work from. Where it is useful and you have given consent, we will speak with the school directly, including attending a learning support meeting.

We do not always get the length right. Reports that carry diagnostic criteria, score tables and evidence for funding or accommodations can run longer than eight pages, and this guide is a fair challenge to move more of that into appendices so the first two pages carry the weight. It is a challenge we are taking up.

If you are holding a report you cannot use

This happens, and it is not your failure as a reader. If you have a report that is dense, score-heavy, or silent on what to actually do, the reasonable next step is to go back to the psychologist who wrote it and ask for the plain-language version of the answer, or for a one-page summary the school can work from.

Most clinicians will do that willingly. The report exists to be useful, and if it is not being used, something has gone wrong in the writing rather than in the reading.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Quinlan, E., Crocker, M., Gayton, D., & Kraska, J. (2026). Making psychological reports useful: A practical guide for psychologists, informed by parent and teacher preferences (Version 1.0). University of Tasmania. https://doi.org/10.25959/31743583.v1

Read the guide, and where we work

• Quinlan et al. (2026), Making Psychological Reports Useful (University of Tasmania)
• Psychological assessment at Ivy Psychology
• Psychologist in Randwick
• Psychology in Coogee

In summary

Parents and teachers want reports that are short, scannable, written in plain language, honest about strengths as well as difficulties, and specific about what to do. Five to nine prioritised recommendations, each with an action, a person and an example. If you are commissioning an assessment, those are fair things to ask for before you book.