Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment SAGES-2 scoring

This isn't a big deal because I know DS met the bar (gifted ID is a multi-step process in my district and this is one step), but I'm curious if anyone has knowledge of scoring on the reasoning subtest of the Sages 2. DS6 says he knows how many he got wrong on the test, though of course he could be off base. (He actually said his tester reviewed the ones he got wrong with him after the test was over...odd.) DS still has to take an individual IQ test to finish the gifted ID process. We're a bit nervous about it because if he does not qualify, it will really mess up our school plans. I definitely think he is gifted, but I'd like to have an idea of how well he handled a formal test. He has a tendency to not take things seriously, depending on his mood. (I mean, he's 6.)

Okay. That is odd. I've never given the SAGES-2, but it would be highly unusual for the protocol to include reviewing the errors with a child, unless the examiner was attempting to test the limits (obviously not very discreetly), perhaps to see if the errors resulted from carelessness, or, as you say, not taking the test very seriously.

The other possibility (and I've seen this one happen with my own child) is that the examiner was not very subtle about how he/she was scoring the items. After coming home from a screening for 1st early entry, my #1 sat down and made up a test for some imaginary students, complete with answer boxes, 0s, and 1s at the end of each line. Clearly, that examiner did not realize that her examinee could see everything she was doing.

I thought it was very odd. It made me wonder if he did not actually hit the bar and the tester was trying to get him in anyway. The school clearly believes he is gifted and probably would like to "hold onto" him.

I know of several children personally who "flunked" this screener on the first try and went on to score strongly gifted on a full WISC. It may have low reliability. They only take one section and it's like a 20-min test or something. I did not receive the score (I don't think I ever will--my other child took the same screener and I never got a score).

It only measures one aspect of intelligence (nonverbal analogic reasoning), which, granted, loads heavily onto "g" general intelligence, but is not the be-all and end-all. Verbally-intelligent kids won't necessarily do well on it. It's also multiple choice, and often group-administered. And above all, it's a screening instrument, not an in-depth assessment.

aeh, can I sort of figure out how he did by looking at page 87 here? I couldn't figure out if those are raw scores.

http://www.prufrock.com/Assets/ClientPages/pdfs/sages/CH06-SAGES-2.pdf

Not really. This tells you that there were 30 items on the reasoning portion of the test, and the median six-year-old gifted student in the norming population appears to have gotten about 9 of them right (more-or-less, based on the median difficulty level of .31). The median six-year-old student not identified as gifted appears to have gotten about 2 of them right. It doesn't tell us what the criterion cutoff is, nor the standard score based on either norm group.

He told me there were "25 or 30" questions and he got 5 wrong. He seemed kind of bummed about getting 5 wrong. But maybe he rocked it.

Yeah, I think the cutoff is determined by the district, so I don't know what that would be.