Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School So, just how accurate were those Pre-K tests?

Cricket2, what you say sounds right. It would be interesting to see some studies of the variation of scores with age, and the causes of such variation.

My kids are early bloomers, so I've been keeping an eye on this. We have definitely known some kids who seemed bright but who were not doing nearly what DD was doing in K who have "bloomed" as the children have aged. So, I do see some evening out--though it is worth saying that what I see now is a bunch of kids who seemed bright but there wasn't really concrete evidence for it now showing concrete proof, but some kids are still ahead. One thing that might muddle things and lead to this observation is that at a certain age, kids don't want to read much past their maturity level. This has been discussed here--what 9yo really wants to read for pleasuure at 1200 Lexile? So bright kids and HG+ kids may all be reading Harry Potter in 2nd or 3rd grade.

I don't know of any children who read at 3 and then evened out. But I don't hang with pushy parents.

I'd probably agree with that comment about kids reading at three. There is only so much that one can hothouse a kid into doing. I definitely saw kids who were the better readers in grade at age 5-7 who aren't gifted, but kids who read unusually early like at three (and I mean really read not just able to sound out cvc words with a lot of parental instruction), probably are going to turn out gifted or close.

I may have the weird kid, but your comment about younger kids not wanting to read beyond their maturity level did give me a smile b/c my dd14 developed an interest in WWII at age 8 and wanted an explanation for how people could have allowed the concentration camps to happen. She read Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority shortly after her eighth bd as a result. I remember that one being assigned reading in a college sociology course I took.

A 6-year-old may not read much beyond his or her maturity level either, but in the case of my DS, it's less about Lexile scores than it is about subject matter! Most of the kidfic that's written at his comfortable decoding level is aimed at mid-grades, and he just doesn't relate to stories that require him to understand "older" social situations and emotional concerns. He's even a bit young for Harry Potter right now. (Give him another year!)

Non-fiction, on the other hand... that's a different story. He'll read all kinds of stuff about science, math, other cultures, food (current fave is "Cooking for Geeks"), whatever. I'm glad he hasn't asked sticky questions about ethics and evil yet. Milgram? Whoa!

Asynchronous development in these kids is so hard to manage. I'm just glad we live in an age when we have a ridiculously large supply of books and online reading material -- even though I'm heavily editing his reading lists, he'll never be bored.

Lots of good comments. I would say that if you look at my DS's subsequent achievement test scores, and how things have panned out in terms of needing a grade skip and accelerated classes, that the SB-V my DS took at age 4 was accurate. More accurate were the predictions and comments that the tester made in her report.

If you haven't already, I would recommend checking out Ruf's "5 Levels of Gifted". It has its drawbacks in that it was a small sample size and much of the information was anecdotal, but it was helpful to me to see all the information about what HG kids were doing when they were young.

My belief is that the very early readers who get high scores on early IQ tests has something to do with figuring out the whole decoding thing, which is useful across the board and tends not to go away so much. But this is just my opinion.

And to quote Dottie, the best way to tell where your kid falls on the GT spectrum is many scores over time. You need more data to see a trend. And who knows what it all means in the future. As polarbear (I think) said, try to address your child's particular needs as they come up. They may change quite a bit, and more quickly than you would like, but if you remain flexible, things will be as good as they can be. There is usually no perfect situation for HG kids, but by knowing your own kid and how he/she learns, you will be in a better position to know what type of educational setting will work.

ds took the wppsi at 4. his score is almost identical to his wisc he took this year at 7. he was reading at about a 1st grade level when he tested at 4...and at about a 5th grade level when he tested this year(he's in 3rd). he did not "even out". he also grade skipped, still has to have pull out/push in services, and is subject accelerated an additional year in math.

Bump

My early-reader, now third-grader did NOT even out. She has a current lexile level of 1100-1260. She also did not "burn out" from her early reading and she LOVES to read.

Oh dear, those might just be the very words I'd use to describe DD8...then and now. Hold on to your hat!

We weren't testing DS for giftedness but were investigating delays. So at 3.5 his score was 106 and at 6 on the WISC it was 126, with his non-verbal score being 141. I think his non-verbal score was around 118 when he was tested at age 3. At age 6, he had the test after taking about 5 other tests on the same day, so I don't know how accurate it was--it might be an underestimate. I have to say that when he was tested at 3 he wasn't particularly cooperative so who knows what his score would have been back then if he had tried harder. It's incredibly hard to test preschoolers. Some are very shy and others are hyper. If a preschool child is extremely calm and cooperative during testing, their score might actually be an overestimate because that child is being compared to all the very intelligent kids who score poorly because they are shy or hyper and don't test well, but are actually brighter.

I think there is research saying that scores can fluctuate a lot until a child is 8 or 9 because of poor test reliability with young children and also differences in brain maturation. Check out the book "Nurture Shock"--there is a chapter in there on giftedness and IQ testing. If a child tests at the extreme high end, they are probably not going to fall down into the "not gifted" range, though. Kids develop at different rates so an early-bloomer is not necessarily gifted and vice versa. My kid was delayed with just about everything and now his GAI is above the 99th percentile, meaning he has surpassed many of the kids who appeared brighter at age 2.

Here is a brief summary of "nurture shock"
http://nurtureshockmoment.blogspot.com/

Interesting but not many people here claim that IQ is an indicator of academic success. In fact most of us know of cases where gifted children did very poorly academically. WPPSI isn't a test for academic success it is a test for academic potential.