Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment 5 std dev variation in scores on the K-TEA

I had my son evaluated at our university Speech and Language center recently. His early speech development was rocky and required a lot of therapy. He got discharged last year for being too smart (my interpretation, clearly), but I continued working on speech based on what I picked up on in the 15 months watching speech therapy sessions.

In the last year, his language skills have gotten really spiky. My reading on Dr Google points to either a language processing problem or a form of dyslexia. Both of these explain part of what I'm seeing, but huge parts of each language processing disorders and dyslexia *don't* fit him.

In our meeting with the clinician immediately after the testing, I left with the sense that they were so wowed by his math score that they couldn't focus on anything else.

I got the report last night. The clinical supervisor is out until Tuesday. The scores vary by 5 standard deviations on the K-TEA II, and the report contains no comment on this. Some of the variation is likely that he hasn't yet been in school despite being nearly 6, and therefore not exposed to things like writing.

DS is 5 years 9 months, starting kindergarten today.

Can someone back out grade level equivalents for these scores based on my (limited) info? I'm trying to tease out "old for grade" vs "not ok, maybe dyslexia"

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His Language Processing Test: Elementary 3rd ed scores (administered after the above, including the hour and 10 minutes on math)

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Any "over the internet diagnosis I bet you're looking at this" ideas?

There is an expression 'twice exceptional' or 'multi exceptional' that refers to kids with spiky profiles that include them with the gifted catagory in some areas and the disability (or 'realtive disabilty) catagory in other areas. If this fits your child, that may explain why 'huge parts of each disorder...don't fit him.' There are stories wild things such as a highly gifted child who was able to 'cover up' his deafness until mid elementary school.

breath

Do you have IQ test scores? If not I think that they would help.

So this shows that K-TEA is an acheivement test. Do you know if they gave him the 'PreK-K' 30 minute test or the 'Grades 1-2' 50 minute test? It may be that at his age, his Math ability is less unusual - or it may be that his Math ability is very very unusual. If he seems to have picked it up all on his own, or you had no idea that he knew stuff, that nudges you in the direction of thinking that his ability to self-teach if very unusally high. If you've been quizzing him daily (not that there is anything wrong with that) then you are maybe looking at a more 'pleasantly gifted' kind of situation.

But if you have supporting IQ scores,and live in the USA, I would recommend you start filling out an application to Davidson Young Scholar's Program, because that Math Score is 160, and he would only need a Math Score of 145 on K-TEA and supporting IQ scores in a single subsection to qualify. For most purposes a score of 130 is the level of unusualness to qualify for most gifted programs. And yes, the age/grade thing is possibly clouding the picture, so try to keep all this info in the 'hum, interesting' catagory of your mind.

If it helps, I define giftedness as a 'special educational need' not as anything much else. You simply want to know if he's is likely to get much out of a classroom program designed to meet the needs of his grademates. You also want to know why he 'doesn't fit' this disability catagories. This could be playing a role. Of course, you are posting on a 'gifted board' so what else would we be thinking? ((wink))

Hope that helps,
Get an IQ test if you don't have one in the last 2 years, not a WPPSI, get a WISC-IV.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

No. Not yet. I'm weighing what and when to do that. I've avoided testing with my kids unless there was something demanding it. At this point, I was focused on his inability to rhyme and limited phonological awareness relative to his reading skills.



He had the comprehensive form, but I don't know which form. The report doesn't say.

My daughter did this too -- I can't judge based on the amount of time. I think the K-TEA part took upwards of 2 hours, an hour and ten minutes on the math since he never hit the ceiling.


Some families maintain a literature-rich household, my house is evidently mathematically rich. He self teaches, he absorbs from the ether, he quizzes us, he checks out math story books from the library, but he also asks to be taught. He showed subtracting with borrowing on the computation part of the test much to my dismay. Turns out my husband had been playing with him on a white board while waiting with him for something else the week before the testing. He said it was maybe 5-10 minutes and two examples. Same thing with fractions - the knowledge he showed on the test was something that we'd read about in a story book.



I've checked DYS out because I am thinking we're going to need some advocacy help. The letter of recommendation is going to be the sticking point. He fails to communicate what he's thinking in a classroom setting, so his teachers have all missed that there's anything unusual about him.

Gifted qualification at our school, including single subject acceleration, requires "all around" gifted for both IQ and achievement. So if he's reading at or even just above grade level, he can't be accelerated in math. There also seems to be a huge selection bias against boys, with less than 1/3 of the kids qualifying for services in each grade are boys.

My daughter was accelerated 1 year in math into a compressed curriculum, so she's currently at a double acceleration. The conversations with the school were tense at best even with her gifted qualification.

I wasn't planning to worry about math ability for kindergarten. Our intervention specialist told me that math would be only 10 minutes a day. With the 138/160 scores in hand, I got the classroom schedule with 30 minutes per day. That makes me anxious.

Wait, upon rereading, I interpret this differently. He had the comprehensive form. I read the info from the website as meaning if you have a preK-K kid you're testing, expect it to take ~30 minutes, 50 minutes if it's a grade 1 or 2 student, etc.

Right?!? I mean, this test included listening comprehension about the origin of phases from old English, the math included stuff my daughter didn't hit until 4th grade "everyday" math.

It's hard to know - I think private testing is in order because his profile seems so spikey. If he is showing unusual giftedness in one particular area, that has to part of what is making his challenge areas present so oddly. It would be ideal if there is a local tester who is both familiar with unusually gifted kids and familiar with kids with learning challenges.

Even if your child is identified 'gifted' in limited areas, and the school has zero interest in meeting his learning needs in those areas, I still think it's a good idea to get the identification because it makes a parent more likely to look into community resources for gifted - state association or university sponsered saturday or summer classes, for example.

I think of those places because that's where we got our letters of recommendation for DYS - we also had the situation where the teacher 'just didn't see anything unusual.' Chess clubs, Math circle, game nights, aviation clubs, 4H, or any other fun activity are also likely sources of letter-writers. Some familys end up hiring a Math mentor. Some of the parents of your daughter's friends who get her giftedness might also be willing to sit with your son for a few minutes, teach him what math they know, and then write a letter.

Smiles,
Grinity

I love the way you put this. I'd suspect, based on this description, particularly that part where he heard about fractions in a story book and was able to apply them on the test, that he is unusally gifted in Math. He may be quite ordinary in every other respect - or his disability may be much greater than anyone has suspected and his gifts in other areas plus his disabilities are 'cancelling each other out' as far as observers can detect - but not as far as he experiences the world.

Lots to think about, yes?
Grinity

Ahhh, I'd understood it needed to be a more formal relationship. I've got parents of friends who see it handily. You just have to shut up the background noise of a classroom, wait for a response, and listen & parse his response.

Honestly, I think that his verbal skill are also quite extraordinary, but that there's been a bottle neck in the reading development, somehow amplified or exacerbated by his speech development issues. However, at this point, I can't hand over the KTEA scores as proof of ability in that area (the state says can be used for both cognitive and achievement?!?)

His expressions, turns of phase, vocabulary, and things he chooses to talk about are highly unusual.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if kindergarten is useless after October when whatever remaining phonological piece falls into place. However, it's possible that it never will, and he'll continue to memorize his way through books and reading levels until he gets to a brick wall. I started down this path because I suspected he'd completely snow the teachers by memorizing his way through school all the way up to the point when he can't anymore.

Thanks, much appreciated.

I'm still curious if anyone reading along at home has a clue as to how the translate those lower scores to grade level equivalents.

I am not an expert, but have you looked into stealth dyslexia? From my (in-expert) understanding dyslexia is, in most people, primarly an auditory/phonemic problem. It's about the inability to hear the phonemes and map them with symbols. And it seems MUCH harder to pick up in very gifted child, particularly a younger child.

From the little bit we know about your son from reading this thread I am guessing that his speech development and reading development issues are directly linked and professional awareness of the severity is being confounded by his cognitive ability.

My eldest is not at all at your DS level of giftedness, and she has other issues going on, though we are struggling to pin point what exactly. But retrospectively I am certain that dyslexia, CAPD and being at least mildly, probably moderately, gifted have combined to present a deeply confusing picture.

At 7 yrs old her language and general knowledge was advanced for her age, but after 2 years in school we were still struggling with recognition of both the sound and name of each letter. Forget reading. Two and half yrs later she has the word recognition of a 12.5 yr old and even higher reading comprehension. When she gives a verbal presentation that she wrote herself, her delivery is well above average for her peers. When she reads aloud from a book it's like listening to sound salad. With great effort I can pick out individual words and tell that she is in fact decoding correctly and I can tell that she comprehends and even enjoys what she's read - but I can't understand a word of it because I am so busy trying to just figure out what each words actually is. I feel like I am hearing what she must have been experiencing all this time and I am astonished she ever learned to read at all, let alone make 7yrs reading progress in 2.5 yrs.

My own dyslexia was picked up by accident in adulthood when my compensation strategies were so solid that it was irrelevant to me to know, though it explained a lot. My DH was never diagnosed but I am sure he ALSO has dyslexia, but of a different form, his sister absolutely does. I think my eldest DD has inherited BOTH of our quirks. The book "Disorganised Children" has a really interesting section on Dyslexia that talks about the idea that there are multiple kinds of dyslexia, presumably of differing genetic origin, thus explaining the varying presentations, varying ways of successfully remediating, varying degrees of severity - and that you might get more than one "type". This was the great "A-ha" moment for me thinking about my DD and our family tree.

One thing I will say is that it was only when painstakingly teaching my eldest to read that I learned any phonetics at all. I remember being taught the e on the end of a word is silent (but not that it changes the vowel sound) and I remember the rule "i before e, except after c". And that is it. When I had a child at school and people started talking about "sight words" I remember being SO confused and thinking "Yeah but there are SO few rules and nearly every word breaks them so aren't ALL words sight words?". Um, apparently not! I was a late reader, but once I had learned the entire language as sight words, or enough of it to map the few words left I didn't know somewhat easily then my literacy took off. Actually a lot like my DDs - I was in remedial english in yr3 and top of my grade by yr5. And I didn't ever hit a brick wall, not with reading anyway.

The point of my story is not to suggest you don't need to figure out what is going on, or suggest that what happened to me was a great outcome. But just that in actual fact he might not ever hit that brick wall you are worried about using the memorisation approach (assuming you mean memorising words), at least with reading. Left to his own devices he may well learn to read completely differently to other people and still take off and have no problems once his own personal map is fully developed. But if he was my kid I would be digging until I had answers.

There are some posters on this board who know WAY more about dyslexia than me and have shared some really awesome links to articles on current theories of dyslexia. So try doing a search here for dyslexia.

Mo3, thank you for that story. The sound salad sounds a bit like what I've wondered what he hears, but maybe in an atypical way? He's also described having to replay what he hears in his head, picture the message, then respond. What I didn't mention was that he spent 4 months when 1 and again 4 months when 2 nearly deaf with viral ear infections. We're dealing with the complicated interaction of missing most of his environment in his first two years, which compounded the things we're seeing. His auditory skills have therefore been playing catch up.

I talked to the clinician on the phone for an hour yesterday:

She didn't have the report in front of her, nor did she have access to the KTEA manual (she was calling from home).

This is one of the few places in the state that specializes in language processing. They were confident he doesn't have a language processing disorder.

They can diagnose dyslexia there, but they don't seem to use a differential abilities diagnosis, they were focused on age appropriate skills. She was confident that the lower scores were a consequence of not yet having been in school (his preschool did no writing beyond the first name) and he could give a $h!t about writing, so it hasn't exactly been a focus 'round these parts. I'm going to use the fact that the clinician doesn't have the manual available until the quarter starts again (end Sept) as my in to go sit with the new vice principal (former intervention services specialist) to get the grade level equivalents. Whooopsie, look at those math scores.

I'm still moderately skeptical. He wasn't given the nonsense word decoding part of the KTEA because it's not normed for a kid under 6. (I note the DIBELS does...) Same with the nonsense rhyming.

The 3 hour KTEA was the comprehensive, and the online times for each grade are indeed an estimate of the time it takes to complete the test. He went through the preK-K stuff, through the grade 1-2 stuff, etc.

He answered 8 questions (I think? I'm trying to remember the raw scores they showed me) beyond the point where he tipped into the 160 range. The clinician says that his verbal and obviously his mathematical abilities are clearly highly gifted. He needs to be in school to round out the skills.

I guess I'm going to give it some time and continue my watch-like-a-hawk mode. I also have to put in a phone call to the local guy that does 2E testing, doesn't take insurance, but has a multi-month wait list.