Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Stanford Achievement Test 10

DS8 (HG + dysgraphia) took the SAT 10 and we just got the results back. This was his end-of-year test after our first semester homeschooling.

He did fine but there are several areas of concern.

Word Study Skills - PR 60% 18 of 30 correct
*This is reading an underlined sound in a word and choosing the matching sound from three choices, if I remember correctly.
Consonant Sounds - PR 56% 5 of 9 correct
Vowel Sounds - PR 11% 1 of 9 correct
Spelling - PR 28% (I'm seeing two different PR on this report. Not sure what this is about. The other is 81%)

His Vocabulary and Comprehension skills are in the 90+% and he has no problems reading. Lexile measure is 880.

What is going on here? Any insight you can offer is helpful.

Thanks!

Maybe he is weak in phonemic awareness? I'm assuming that is what the vowel sounds and consonant sounds measure. If he is already reading well, I don't think I'd be concerned unless you suspect dyslexia. It's also possible that he didn't understand what he was supposed to do on that part of the test. Hopefully someone else can chime in.

It appears that you are reporting both percent correct and percentile. The former is of less significance than the latter, as only percentile rankings are derived from age norms. Word study skills, consonant sounds, and vowel sounds are all sub skills, with no true normative information. (No percentiles.) Spelling is an actual subtest, with percentile scores. If both scores are actually percentiles, you are probably seeing normative comparisons to different groups. One (most likely the higher one) compares him to the nationwide general norms. The other probably compares him to a narrower group, such as private schoolers, ACSI (Christian school) members, etc. That is a self-selected group that tends to function higher than the nationwide norm, hence lower percentile scores for the same absolute level of function.

Interpretation of the subskills is not as reliable or accurate. I'd avoid splitting hairs. There should be some check marks under columns marked something like below average/average/above average. That's about how deeply you can interpret the subskills.

All that being said, I would keep an eye on the vowel sounds, and spend a little extra attention on observing his de novo decoding skills. High functioning compensated/stealth dyslexics often have no noticeable problem reading, but continue to have subtle spelling vulnerabilities, which is the flip side of the same skill as decoding. And you describe him as Dx dysgraphic, which would fit.

Thank you both.

A few more details:
-he seemingly learned to read overnight; never really sounded words out
-he often skips words
-often inserts words (little words-but, the, and)
-sometimes skips entire lines
-for words he doesn't know, he seems to look at the first few letters and inserts a word he does know, automatically (he'll catch it when it doesn't make sense in context)
-CAN'T spell-he does best orally, but often times spell check can't correct his inventive spelling

I've been attributing the spelling entirely to dysgraphia. Should I be concerned about dyslexia at this point? Is there overlap between the two?

I don't want to go fishing for a problem if there's not one, but I also don't want to ignore something that needs to be addressed.

Hmm. Sounds like he is a sight word reader, which means he has not really developed phonetic decoding skills. That sometimes happens just because those with a good memory and good vocabulary find it to be the path of least resistance, but it may also be due to neurologically-based deficits in phonemic awareness and other precursor skills to word-level decoding--IOW, something of the dyslexic ilk. Either way, it probably contributes to his spelling weaknesses, and may become an obstacle, should he pursue a field in which there are many low-frequency/specialized terms that differ by only a few letters. E.g., molecular biology, pharmacology.

And yes, there is substantial overlap between dyslexia and dysgraphia. Might be worth while to investigate this further. You can experiment with some phonological processing tasks (in more-or-less increasing order of complexity): blending phonemes (c-a-t-->cat), substitutions (cat: change the c sound to a m sound), omitting syllables (cowboy: now say it without the cow), elision (nest: say without the s sound), reversals (say cat backwards-->tack). At his age, he should be able to all of those fairly easily, with progressively longer words, except possibly for lengthy phoneme reversals (the last task). He should still be able to do some, though.

There was a recent discussion of early signs of dyslexia; you may want to check some of the suggested resources to see if anything resonates. (I'll try to resist repeating that thread, but I'm always ready to talk more if that could be helpful to you ). Either way, it sounds possible that your DS might benefit from learning explicitly how to decode, if he jumped over that stage?

ETA functional link: http://giftedissues.davidsongifted..../212491/Stealth_dyslexia.html#Post212491
(Sorry George - and it was your post!)

MichelleC, I don't think your link works...

Thanks for the link, MichelleC. A lot of this conversation sounds like DS.

The psych who tested him originally didn't see any sign of dyslexia. I asked her about it after we had some LMB assessments done. She's a great psych...Hoagie's recommended. Interesting that dyslexia keeps popping up, however.

Aeh, I asked him the few questions you listed above and he did fine at this basic level. I know the decoding is a problem and had been planning to have my MIL evaluate him over the summer. She's a reading specialist. She's not accustomed to working with gifted kids, so I'm not sure how it will go.

We're homeschooling and I have plans to begin HWOT and All About Spelling next year. Do I also throw in phonics? Do I teach DS5 and DS8 phonics/reading at the same time??? That's somewhat rhetorical but I thought I was done with curve balls. Lol.

It does seem to be common perception that dyslexia can't be identified in young kids, but Shaywitz is quite adamant that signs are there at the earliest times (though perhaps a lot harder to detect in an HG kid, I would suspect).

NikiHarp, it sounds you you are right on top of things, and should be able to obtain the info you need. It might help, though, to give your mom and others warning that they might not find what they expect to see. I am a broken record on this one, but do not underestimate the amount of masking and compensating a gifted child can pull off.

DD had a full psycho-education assessment at age 7.5, where psych diagnosed dyslexia. The big give-away was the CTOPP results, which when mixed with the other tests, beautifully demonstrated that she had been doing exactly what we thought - superb guessing instead of reading - but had never been able to catch her at. She could get 80% of the words right without being able to read - I still can't quite wrap my head around how she did it, nor can her teachers. I don't know what part of the results made DD's teacher's jaw drop further - the 99th percentile VCI, or the 1st percentile sentence building in the WIAT. DD was a classic case of the two combining to make her look very average.

We then had a detailed assessment done by a dyslexia reading specialist: reading, writing and spelling (in two languages). After the first one-hour session, specialist hauled me on to the carpet and demanded "you DO know that dyslexia is a phonemic deficit, right?" With tone. Much tone. She made it clear she thought we were nuts to be there, wasting her time and our money. Our psych had led us astray. (In the reading specialist's defence, she only got DD's report that afternoon - and DD's phonemic awareness is 88th percentile. She doesn't tank until the phonemic manipulation tasks start getting a lot more complicated than simple recognition. Her spelling is surprisingly phonetic as well.)

After 2nd hourly assessment, I'm called to the floor again, and this time she's waving DDs writing sample, again telling me in no uncertain terms that it's perfectly reasonable, quite phonetic, and she's seen way worse in her breakfast cereal that morning. I just nod and keep my mouth shut this time.

But after she finished the assessment - tacking on a fifth session/ hour instead of the planned four - she tells me, "oh yes, totally dyslexic" like there was never any doubt in her mind, only ours. Once she got past the masking, it was obvious, but it took her a long time to get past the in-your-face ability, and dig down to find the underlying deficit. She was looking for the classic signs that everybody has, and she couldn't find them. Instead, she had to create tasks that couldn't be compensated. (This is what I found amazing in DD's psycho-ed evaluation - moving through from the WISC to WIAT to CTOPP etc, you could clearly see where, as each subsequent task stripped away one more compensation mechanism, the scores dropped, dropped, dropped.)

Now, my DD is MG, and she has average working memory. If you add in the extra ability of HG, you will undoubtedly crank up the hiding ability too. And if the experience of others in my family can be extrapolated, if you add in off-the-charts memory and visual spatial skills, you have people who can't decode to save their life, but can memorize the shape of every word they use, and "see" it in their head to read as well as to reproduce on paper (backwards, forward, upside down, it doesn't matter to DH. It's a shape, not a word, and he can flip and rotate in his head at will).

So all that to say, your mother may well not find what she's looking for, and not see any of what she's used to seeing, without being really, REALLY persistent. While Shaywitz emphasizes reduced speed, not accuracy, as the key hallmark of dyslexia, there are a few on this board with dyslexic children who read fast and in great volume - by-passing phonemic deficits through verbal ability and perhaps prodigious memory, I would guess. The Eides in contrast really point to spelling as the big tell for stealth dyslexia. But even that... I have never seen DH mis-spell anything. But he doesn't spell words, he draws them (I guess the same way dysgraphics "draw" letters, come to think of it?). And I was quite shocked recently when I asked, and he admitted that he regularly changes what he was going to write in order to avoid having to put in a word for which he can't come up with a picture.

Sorry to write a book! As for phonics, If you're doing All About Spelling, you may want to try out a first level of All About Reading too - if your older DS blows through it, its still a great learn-to-read resource for the younger. And if, like mine, he manages to read a nightly page of our current novel and yet stumbles on the level 1, lesson 1 list of context-free three-letter words, well, you'll know you've come to the right place. Even after all the assessment, I still didn't really believe she couldn't do it until I saw it - and I had had her reading books to me every night for two years. I think for DD, the biggest learning is that the program forces her to look at every. single. letter. in a word, and and every. single. word. in a sentence. I have to be ruthless in not letting her scan for broad meaning and just wing it, as she has accustomed herself to doing. It's really easy to see, still, how hard it is for her to pay attention to linking words and word endings, but she's come a huge way. Again, sorry about the book. I'm still a tad evangelical about all this, I know!

Ah, yes. I remember that discussion, MichelleC! Thanks for fixing the link.

Sounds like we have our work cut out for us to figure out what is going on with DS6. It's actually a little less on my mind now, because his Lexile reading level has continued to skyrocket since I made that post in March. He's now getting the gist of books with Lexile scores of 780 (so his level is probably 100 or so below that), still way up from the beginning of the year. But... I know that this doesn't really rule out dyslexia.

Really interesting observation! DS just the other day demonstrated that he is really good at reading words which are upside down. Is this unusual for a 6-year-old?