Every psychologist I've talked to describes the same quiet irony: they pour hours into a rigorous assessment report, and the one section a teacher or parent will actually act on — the recommendations — is the one that most often gets skimmed. From those conversations, and from what the people who read these reports say they need, a clear pattern keeps surfacing: the recommendations that get used are specific, traceable to a finding, ranked by priority, and concrete enough to start on Monday morning.
I'm not a clinician, and I'd never tell a psychologist how to practice. What I can do is listen — I've spent the past year talking with the people who write these reports and the referrers who read them — and pass along what they told me about why the most important section so often gets lost.
The recommendations are the part a reader takes away and acts on — which is why the psychologists I spoke with wish they didn't arrive at the tired end of the write-up.
Why do assessment report recommendations get ignored?
The clinicians I've spoken with had a theory, and the research backs them up: mostly, it's because generic recommendations are too vague to use. A 2023 study on the generic nature of recommendations in psychoeducational reports found that recommendations often lack practical guidance on how they'd actually be carried out in a classroom — and that teachers strongly prefer specific, detailed suggestions, and are far more likely to implement academic ones than vaguer behavioural ones.
The frustration runs deeper than length. A qualitative study of teachers' experiences with the assessment process captured it in a phrase teachers themselves used: "don't do more, do different." And a 2026 scoping review of school-based report-writing practices concluded that, despite decades of research on what to include, the real-world usefulness of assessment reports is still limited — readers struggle to turn them into action.
So the psychologists aren't leaving recommendations out. The people I talked to were clear: the recommendations are there — they're just written in a way that reads as advice a teacher already knows.
What do the readers say makes a recommendation land?
When I asked around, the same four things came up — from the psychologists who write them and the teachers who use them:
- Specific. "Provide extended time on written tasks, up to 50% more" lands where "consider accommodations" doesn't. Name the thing, the setting, and the amount.
- Traceable to a finding. Readers told me they trust a recommendation more when they can see the result it grew from.
- Prioritized. A ranked list of five that flags the two that matter most gets acted on. An unranked list of twenty gets shelved.
- Doable now. Written so the reader knows who does what, and could start this week without a translation step.
The through-line I heard: fewer, sharper recommendations beat a comprehensive dump. Not my opinion — theirs.
How do the strongest reports tie a recommendation to a finding?
The psychologists whose reports get praised tend to make the link visible. If the assessment surfaced a specific weakness, the recommendation that addresses it points back to that result — so a reader can follow the thread from evidence to suggestion. They told me it does double duty: it makes the recommendation more useful and more defensible, because it now reads as a conclusion the report earned rather than a boilerplate line.
It's the same discipline I've heard described around turning raw scores into a narrative and around what makes a report defensible: every claim followable back to its evidence. Recommendations are just where that discipline pays off in the real world, because they're the part someone picks up and runs with.
A recommendation only counts once a teacher or parent can act on it — the readers I spoke with were unanimous on that.
What do teachers and parents say they need from a recommendation?
The people holding the report at 8 a.m. were the most direct of anyone I talked to. What they asked for, again and again:
- Cut the jargon. If a classroom teacher can't act on it without a glossary, it doesn't get used.
- Say who does what. A recommendation with a clear owner moves; one addressed to no one stalls.
- Anchor it to a setting. "During independent reading" or "for multi-step math" tells them exactly where it applies.
- Keep the list short and ranked. Depth on the top few beats a shallow twenty.
I've collected more of what these referrers say in the questions referrers ask of assessment reports — they have strong, useful opinions, and they're worth listening to.
Does saving time on the write-up make the recommendations better?
I think it can, indirectly — and here's the honest version of why. The psychologists I talk to say the recommendations deserve their sharpest thinking, but they usually arrive at hour twelve of a write-up, when everything is already overdue. School psychologists in particular are stretched thin: the National Association of School Psychologists recommends one school psychologist for every 500 students, while the current US ratio sits around 1,071 to 1. And a survey of health-service psychologists found most reported working "at full capacity" (41%) or "over-extended" (39%), with non-billable clinical activities among the top sources of stress.
None of that is a knock on the work — it's the reason the last section so often gets the tired paragraph. Software can't and shouldn't write anyone's recommendations; that judgment belongs to the person who interpreted the findings. What it can do is take the mechanical weight off the rest of the report — the retyping, the reformatting, the blank page — so the recommendations arrive with something left in the tank. That's the idea behind what we're building at Soma: a first draft in your structure that you review, edit, and finalize.
I'm grateful to the psychologists and teachers who've told me, plainly, what makes a recommendation useful. I'll never write one myself — but the more clearly I understand which section carries the real-world weight, the better we can protect the hours it deserves.
— Ian
