Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Active Threads This Week

Nice to hear from you again, perse! And also good to hear that your older one eventually did get what he needed in school.

As to #2: Her Lexile is indeed quite high for her age. It's also not crazy for a GT kiddo, hyperlexic or no. That's about where one of ours was at that age--reaching what Metametrics would consider college-ready around third or fourth grade. And that's starting from simple decodables just after the fourth birthday. The Lexile is about where the median entering-7th grader was in the MetaMetrics studies. the iReady score is about where the median entering-8th grader was in the relevant studies. So they match up reasonably well, all things considered. (iReady is more focused on decoding at this age, and Lexiles are about comprehension.)

And math being only a grade or two ahead is likely not only a function of the differential impact of instruction on math (vs reading, which is gated in a fluent decoder mainly by vocabulary and socio-cultural context), but also on the ceiling of the grade two tests. On top of that, there are differences between percentiles (ordinal performance versus age-peers) and grade-level expectations. Consider that the majority (69%) of USA fourth graders read below grade-level on the 2024 NAEP. Most programmatic standardized testing scores reported to parents are taken from tests designed to identify at-risk learners, so the spread below grade-level also is quite a bit more detailed than that above.

Regarding advocacy: If this is the same district, you have the advantage this time of your older child's experience. (I'm one of a sibling group of GT learners, and the younger sibs definitely benefited from parental advocacy for the older sibs.) (And btw, it actually speaks well of your district's commitment to at-risk learners that they are using Fundations as their tier 1 reading curriculum. It's relatively expensive, and labor-intensive training teachers, but it's also highly effective at catching and remediating readers at-risk of dyslexia early, when implemented correctly. This also suggests your district may have some resources to work with...) And on the advocacy front for Fundations, it does include unit assessments at the higher levels (grade 4 & 5), which might be one way to demonstrate to the district that she can move on from it.

And if it's a different district, then you can talk wistfully about what a struggle it was to get the past districts to support your son, and how happy you are to be working with this one instead, since they are so much more student-centered.

For our own children, we haven't had to deal with much of this, as we've homeschooled most of K-12. I have worked in schools for longer than I care to think about, though, and can say a few things, in no particular order:

1. Having a key school staff member as an ally is extremely helpful.
2. Come prepared with win-win solutions-- these respect teachers' time and expertise, and are also presented as strategies that will help them display their own strengths better.
3. If the conversation starts to slide toward how this may affect other students, respecfully but firmly re-focus the conversation on your child.
4. Consider and prioritize the functions and needs that are most impactful for your child, and be willing to compromise on lower-priority items as an act of good faith collaboration.

indigo has a rather comprehensive roundup of crowd-sourced advocacy tips from over the years. Search for "advocacy roundup" and I think it should come up. I know there are links connected to the "advocacy as a non-newtonian fluid" thread.

As it happens, the scoring program(s) that nearly everyone uses for the WISC-V (including in the UK) generates a GAI automatically along with the FSIQ. All of the subtests necessary for the GAI are included in the FSIQ, so no additional testing or even table-lookups are needed (since, unless the psych is in the tiny minority of professionals still hand-scoring, the publisher's software will have done all the work already). Formally, there are not VECI, EFI, EGAI or extended index scores for the UK norms, so those would have to be derived from US norms and interpreted with caution.

But I understand why she does not want to report an FSIQ, as her professional opinion is that it is not a good representation of your child's overall cognitive ability. (In those circumstances, I typically include it in the document somewhere for reference, asterisked, but deemphasize it in my analysis.)

With regard to the GAI, it may be that the spread across just those five subtests is also large enough that she does not judge it to be a good representation of overall cognition. You report that four of the five primary indices were in the Extremely High range. That is not incompatible with a large magnitude of intrasubtest scatter. As a back-of-the-napkin example, consider that a score in the EH range can result from two scaled scores of 16 in the same index. But what actually generates the index score is the sum of the two subtests. So instead of 16, 16, they could have been 13, 19, which is a pretty significant difference. Many evaluators would consider the resulting index score to be a poor representation of the domain, and choose not to report it.

Your child also has a marked relative weakness in processing speed, which may be motor-based, or may be cognitive-based. Or both. Consider that even the GAI includes two timed subtests, which means it can be subject to score-lowering effects in a child with significantly discrepant speed. Consequently, the only index-level score that may not be affected by his known area of weakness is the VCI, and possibly WMI, depending on how weak his fine-motor efficiency is.

Bottom line: there may well be an entirely legitimate professional reason that the evaluator, in her clinical judgement, does not choose to report a composite score (either the FSIQ or the GAI). Have you identiifed a key advocacy use for a formal composite number? If you have, you might try leading with that in your communications with the psych, possibly wrapped in, "I know this may not be the best indicator of his real ability, but it's what the (school, program, etc.) demands in order for him to access this opportunity". It may also be that some resources would respond to presenting the relevant primary index scores for focused advancement.

Was the testing done through the school? If so, there may be different rules ...

... but at least in the US, when you pay to have a private EP run testing, you typically receive at least:

- the scaled score and percentile rank for each subtest
- the composite score and percentile rank for the primary indices (VCI, VSI, FRI, WMI, PSI) and FSIQ

Spikiness and differences of 2-3 SD's (standard deviations) or more between relatively high and relatively low on the WISC-V is not uncommon with highly gifted, profoundly gifted, or twice-exceptional children (some may even say that score profile is in the majority among these populations) ... so I wonder how much experience with those kinds of populations, your EP has had?

In any case, if she has scaled scores for all of the subtests, she can calculate an FSIQ. Whether she is doing it electronically via Q-Global or looking up tables in the Technical Manual, there is nothing about the range of subtest scores that prevents an FSIQ from being calculated. She is correct that the wider the spread among the subtests the less reliable the FSIQ is considered to be. But she has already provided you with that expert overlay.

On a related note, be aware that schools have wide discretion on how they want to identify giftedness. If a school wants to stick to FSIQ and not use other indices such as GAI or EGAI, that is their call (not saying it's the right call, just saying it's their call and they don't have to change it.)

Here is a GREAT use of AI, in my opinion: Ray Ban Meta Glasses (for the blind)!
Useful for the blind and also for their care givers, the glasses respond to voice commands. They have a tiny camera in the frame and can report back to the wearer, answering their questions.

A demonstration during a TV ad includes: "Which is the blue shirt?" 
This website includes the TV ad I saw: 
https://lighthouseguild.org/news/fr...sses-for-every-blind-veteran-in-america/

https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/ray-ban-meta-ai-glasses