Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WISC results not as expected

Thanks, good to see there are some tools for long term memory testing.

I think of those more as baseline skills (with some aptitiude component) that many people never grok accidentally through school. Along the lines of my going through school getting marked down for handwriting, and not realizing until my thirties that I've been holding my pencil wrong my whole life and no teacher ever mentioned it. Or when I was in school they didn't teach study skills or note taking.

To the origional post if a kid is particularly talented in memory encoding and retrieval, then they could show a marked discrepancy between achievement, IQ, and effort.

Thank you all. I was able to get her to the optometrist. We ended up with a prescription for reading glasses. I feel badly that I did not catch this sooner. He didn't seem to think that she had tracking issues though. I guess we will try out the glasses and go from there.

Glad to hear you figured out one element of the story. Don't feel bad that you didn't catch the vision earlier. When our #1 finally got corrective lenses, one of the first comments I heard was, "Now I don't have headaches anymore!" To which my first thought was, how long had there been headaches without my knowing about it? ! Apparently for several months, which doesn't, of course, include the period of time when glasses were probably in order, but it wasn't causing sufficient eye strain for headaches to be in play.

Give her a few weeks with the glasses and see if you observe any changes in behavior or preferences regarding visual-spatial tasks, reading, writing, etc.

My son's WISC-IV results came back earlier this week, and it was not what we were expecting at all, either.

There is definitely something fishy about the spread of those scores that suggests that they're are depressed to no small degree. For example, comprehension and vocabulary have a correlation of 0.74, yet there was a four point difference in her scores on those tests.

Secondly, two of the subtests that enter into the perceptual reasoning index, picture concepts and matrix reasoning, are measures of fluid reasoning. Fluid reasoning correlates perfectly with full-scale IQ (i.e., 100% of the shared variance for those tests is pure g). On both of those tests, your daughter performed exceptionally well.

Her low digit-span score also suggests a degree of anxiety during the time that she was tested. Block design measures a narrow CHC theory ability known as "spatial relations," and it is known that males tend to perform significantly better than females on such tasks. This is not because men are more intelligent (the average IQ of the genders is essentially the same), but because such abilities tend to be positively correlated with testosterone level up to a maximum threshold. If her block design score were compared to the female population exclusively, her scaled score would undoubtedly be higher. This again suggests a spuriously low reported IQ.

It is not uncommon for parents to overestimate the abilities of their children, but I think that in this case your daughter's test scores are the result of temporary psychological impediments such as the aforesaid sleep apnea and anxiety associated with your expected departure. Her actual full-scale IQ may be well in excess of 130.

It may be worth noting that myopia correlates positively with IQ, and that this correlation is not extrinsic (i.e., not the result of cross-assortative mating). This is confirmed because studies have found that the correlation between myopia and IQ still exists between gifted and non-gifted siblings. One can not say the same for, e.g., the correlation between height and IQ, which exists in the general population but is nonexistent among gifted and non-gifted siblings. In other words, the correlation between height and IQ only exists because both height and intelligence are valued by society, and thus tall and intelligent people are more likely to procreate.

I did not read all the responses, but it seems to me that if vision did have an effect on test scores, it would affect the tests like block design and matrix reasoning the most.

DS took the WISC after a brain injury palsied the sixth cranial nerve, meaning one eye was stuck and could not move at all for months. He went to school with a patch on his normal eye, so that he would not lose his vision and he was able to read with an eye that did not track (this was kindergarten). When he was not patched, he had severe double vision at all times, but he was still able to read fluently, he just closed one eye or looked at one of the two books that he saw and ignored the other one (sounds weird I know, but that's what he said. That there were two books side-by-side and he just focused on one of them). I took him in for neuropsych testing when his eye was still not fully normal (it gradually regained tracking ability to the outside--a tiny bit each day, and the two images moved closer together each day), and he did fine on all the tests involving vision. I'm not trying to say that I don't think it's possible that a child could be affected by vision issues, but with DS, it seemed to affect him very little in terms of how he was able to function. He would run up/down steps just like before, even with no depth perception and he must have been seeing two sets of steps. Kids have amazing resilience. Sounds like in your DD's case she is far-sighted (????) but if she is able to read fluently, it's probably not bad enough that it would have affected test results that much.
That all being said, DS had the same gap on the WISC w/ verbal being lower. I think it was 114 and PRI was 141. Coding was his lowest score (a 10). He DOES have a disability--he has dyspraxia/devepmental coordination disorder. So he is slow with motor skills and that caused somewhat lower scores with the tests that involved motor skills and were timed, like coding and block design (block design was I think a 13, where the other PRI tests were 18-19). In terms of verbal skills, he had delayed speech, which is common with dyspraxia,and at age 6 when he was tested, that could have still been playing a role. I think that he continues to improve with time and the VCI probably was not a truly accurate representaion of his long-term ability. His reading comprehension scores (which test above-level), are 99th+ percentile, which doesn't go along with a 114 VCI. I think it's possible that DS also said "I don't know" to any of the questions that he didn't feel like answering. He does that with me all the time. The person testing doesn't necessarily know if the kid really doesn't know, or if they are just saying that.

I have heard of autism spectrum disorder causing significant gaps (either a much higher verbal or much higher non-verbal), but it doesn't seem like there would be any reason to suspect that in your DD. I did some research trying to figure out what this gap meant, and most of what I found involved PRI being lower. DS's neuropsych called it a "relative weakness" but didn't think it meant anything. He seemed more concerned about DS's processing speed score, which was around 110, saying that the gap between that and his PRI score would cause frustration later (where he understands very advanced concepts but the speed is not there).

If you need a test score for a gifted program (not sure why you were testing?) you may want to consider having a different test, like the Stanford Binet, just to make sure you're not missing something.

My experience has been that some areas of executive functioning are as important, if not more important, in terms of school success than IQ. Your daughter obviously has some significant cognitive strengths and it is possible that she has exceptional executive functioning which explains her success in school. Just a theory:).