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    Joined: Nov 2013
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    DD#2 - now age 11.5 - was in a lockstep, low-level-stated-mandated-test-prep-oriented not-at-all-accelerated-or-differentiated public school through the first half of 3rd grade. Second half of 3rd grade, we transferred her to a school for "gifted and superior [top 10% on something]" kids, which is a start-up and kind of disorganized (no clear curriculum path, no vertical alignment of curriculum), but the kids are overall fairly bright, and they do read and write and stuff instead of just prepping for low-level standardized tests the way the public school did. DD#2 was not grade or subject-accelerated (never ever allowed in our system), though we did do lots of playful acceleration things at home, and read tons and tons.

    DD#2 reads voraciously for pleasure at home, mostly fiction, but sometimes science too. She now loves to write fiction and plays as well, though she was turned off of writing for a while in 3rd grade, when a very bad gifted-pull-out teacher taught them writing and insisted on quantity over detail and depth.

    Developmental milestones for both of our daughters are consistent with "exceptionally" gifted profile / possible Ruf 5. DD#2 started speaking meaningfully and with complexity early. Very interested in books and stories very young. But reading didn't take off very early with her the way it did with our older EG DD#1. DD#2 preferred to be read to, and before kindergarten (age 5.5) was really just reading Dr. Seuss books herself. During full-day kindergarten (plus long bus ride), she was tired after school, and would read to herself some - Dr. Seuss books or the easy Little House books (not the real ones). But she seemed to get tired out very quickly. Reading began to take off summer after kindergarten, with the sudden realization on everyone's part that she could easily read a full Magic Treehouse book, wait! several full Magic Treehouse books! in a row. Then another big jump the summer after 1st grade (age 7.5) when she read Harry Potter books 1-5. By the beginning of second grade, she was testing at 6th grade on Accelerated Reader computer-adaptive STAR test, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test. On another school computer-adaptive test at the beginning of 3rd grade, she tested overall at almost the 8th grade reading level, with scores at 10th grade for short passages, and lower scores for long passages, higher scores for fiction, and lower scores for non-fiction.

    When she was 10.5, we had her tested by psychologist specializing in gifted kids with WISC-IV and WJ-III.

    Results for WISC-IV Age 10:

    Verbal Comprehension (VCI)
    COMPOSITE SCORE 155
    PERCENTILE RANK >99.9

    Perceptual Reasoning (PRI)
    COMPOSITE SCORE 129
    PERCENTILE RANK 97

    Working Memory (WMI)
    COMPOSITE SCORE 132
    PERCENTILE RANK 98

    Processing Speed (PSI)
    COMPOSITE SCORE 94
    PERCENTILE RANK 34

    Full Scale (FSIQ)
    138
    PERCENTILE RANK 99

    General Ability Index (GAI)
    151
    PERCENTILE RANK >99.9

    WJ-III Age 10

    Total Achievement
    SS 140
    PERCENTILE RANK 99.6
    GE 12.6

    Broad Reading
    SS 128
    PERCENTILE RANK 97
    GE 10.2

    Broad Math
    SS 142
    PERCENTILE RANK 99
    GE 13.0

    Broad Written Language
    SS 134
    PERCENTILE RANK 99
    GE 13.0

    Academic Skills
    SS 142
    PERCENTILE RANK 99.7
    GE 13.0

    Academic Fluency
    SS 122
    PERCENTILE RANK 92
    GE 8.3

    Academic Applications
    SS 135
    PERCENTILE RANK 99
    GE 13.0

    DD#2 ceilinged out on all 6 of the GAI subtests (did not meet discontinue criterion on any of them); actually, same for all of the GAI supplemental subtests, with exception of Information.

    Psychologist noted big difference between other indices and the PSI. Said there were no mistakes on any of the PSI subtests, but speed was slow. She also gave DD#2 the supplemental Cancellation test (not included in the reported PSI), and that score was even LOWER - at 16th percentile for random Cancellation and at 5th percentile for structured Cancellation. The Cancellation tests were the last tests given in a couple hours of testing that first day (the psychologist did give breaks, but DD does tend to tire, and she is slightly anxious about performance, and had been nervous about doing the testing, so even though I think she eventually relaxed with the very nice psychologist, I am sure it was stressful for her, and she hadn't slept very well, had mild stomach ache at the beginning). Also, Block Design scaled score was 14 - no errors - she solved all the puzzles but got no bonus points for speed, and she solved the hardest one out of the time limit so got no credit for that one. So clearly lack of speed suppressed PRI.

    Psychologist also noted possible effect of "low processing speed" on the writing and math WJ-III fluency tests - overall Academic Fluency was 122 while Total Achievement was 140.

    Finally, psychologist noted relatively low WJ-III reading scores. Reading Comprehension score was 123, with several errors. Reading Fluency was around the same, with her making several errors and skipping one sentence.

    So what does all this mean? ... Many possibilities....

    DD#2 does not act in that dreamy way that classic ADD / primarily inattentive kids do. She speaks very quickly. She does have some performance anxiety, and her natural "set point" is to try not to make errors; although, if she has experience with the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy - e.g., playing a video game over and over - I think she is able to adjust by speeding up even at the cost of some errors, if that increases the overall score (i.e., she's not stubbornly obsessively perfectionistic, just cautious by default). She has sometimes gone too slowly on homework, particularly when she is anxious about teacher's response, when it is writing (she has "too many ideas" and has trouble getting them all down in a coherent way, she feels), and/or when she is tired after a long day. Example: Difficulty in 3rd grade "writing a story using vocabulary words" as homework after a long day, because she thinks the story should make sense and have a good story arc (and that would be hard to do for an adult to do quickly too!). I had to repeatedly reassure her that it's okay for the story to be silly at times to incorporate all of the vocabulary words, and still get the story done in 15 minutes. My older daughter (diagnosed with ADHD) acted the same way, except she didn't have anxiety - she also took forever to write stories because the stories in her head were LONG and COMPLICATED, yet she had a PSI in the 120s.

    We have seen less of this problem - melt-downs with homework and having to be talked down - as she has adjusted to the new school over the last 2.5 years.

    As a result of all of this, I am not necessarily convinced that the low PSI for DD#2 means anything other than that she is naturally cautious. It COULD mean something else, but I am not convinced that it does.

    The reading comprehension and reading fluency scores are interesting. As I said, DD#2 reads voraciously for pleasure (6 or more hours during the summer), and she appears to read very, very fast. (Much faster than I or my husband read - I don't consider myself a super fast reader, but I read fast enough to get a perfect score on the LSAT, so watching my 9-10-year-old read 50% to 100% faster than me is an eerie experience.) One of the psychologist's suggestions was maybe that because she reads fiction for pleasure so much, and since her school emphasizes critical thinking, she may have developed a habit of not worrying too much about picky little details.

    In general, the psychologist noted "processing speed's" effect on different scores. She suggested that DD#2 may have a visual processing problem (we had had an earlier 30-minute OT screen that suggested mild visual tracking problem and mild problem catching a ball - never followed up).

    So I have a very general question. How surprising is it that a kid with a 155+ VCI would have a WJ-III Comprehension score of 123, or a WJ-III Broad Reading score of 128? She spent K-first half of 3rd grade in a school environment that didn't challenge her at all (in any way). Her new school is more engaging and I believe she is learning much more over all, but they don't do worksheets where the focus on making sure that they don't miss little details (and the curriculum is a little scattershot too - sometimes they read books and then end up never discussing them, due to lack of time - new school, new teachers, etc. - which means that if she is missing details in reading by reading too fast for "big picture" stuff, she might not ever find out). I know I've read that it's not unusual for achievement scores to be below IQ scores where the kid has not had much opportunity for acceleration or enrichment, and she has not had that IN SCHOOL. I do realize that that's a pretty big gap....

    The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out whether there is some other "issue" - beyond her just being cautious the only time she had a chance to take the 3 subtests for PSI, and her having a habit of maybe NOT reading carefully on timed or untimed tests where details will turn out to matter much more than the "big picture". A year after the psychologist's testing, I have finally gotten her an appointment with a developmental optometrist. We had the first of two scheduled appointments earlier this week, and she apparently is far-sighted: +1.5 in one eye, and +1.25 in another. At first I thought "ah ha - we have missed that - maybe that's IT [cause of all problems and test discrepancies]!!!" (she'd only had vision screens with pediatrician each year, and these were normal). But when I started researching, it seemed like far-sightedness in kids isn't that unusual, this amount of far-sightedness is very mild, and kids can usually "accommodate" for it. I guess we'll know more at later appointments, either from more testing or from more explanation by optometrist. But I'm already wondering about this. I'm pretty sure the optometrist wants her to get glasses to correct that far-sightedness, and she's going to try to see if "prisms" will help or not. She also said that DD#2 has something like tight resting eye muscle state (NOT her exact wording, just my understanding), which comes from reading a lot as a young child (and maybe because of the far-sightedness?) and which could be very tiring, and that vision therapy might or might not turn out to be useful for that or necessary for that. At the next appointment, the optometrist will screen for more stuff, like the visual tracking and I don't know what else.

    I do realize that some of this developmental optometry stuff is controversial. I really wish it had turned out that she was very far-sighted, and then we could give glasses a try and see if that helped significantly. But with such low amounts of far-sightedness, I do wonder if glasses will even make any difference, and I am not eager to engage in expensive, VERY troublesome (for us and for DD#2 who is already in school 7 hours a day plus bus rides in both directions), and controversial visual therapy, etc., all based on a processing speed score that could be explicable in other ways, reading and writing achievement scores that could be explicable in other ways, and other symptoms (like fatigue, dislike of writing in 3rd grade) that come and go and could be explicable in other ways.

    So I'm wondering about thoughts on these WISC-IV and WJ-III results in relation to possibly related IRL things and in relation to vision issues in particular.

    Oh, one more thing: When questioned specifically, she says that she reads something like paragraphs all at one time, and ALWAYS reads at least full lines at one time - she does not perceive herself as moving her eyes as she reads across a line. Obviously, she could be wrong, but I thought it's interesting that she thinks that.

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    Welcome!

    These are excellent scores all around, with the exception of the timed tasks. It is true that there are many possible explanations for the lower speeded scores, including vision/tracking/convergence issues, perfectionistic tendencies, anxiety, and fatigue.

    At face value, her reading comprehension appears a bit lower than might be expected by her VCI/GAI, but is actually not strikingly low, based on the available regression tables (there are better discrepancy tables released by the publisher of the WJ for the WISC-III and WJIII, but I had to use a more generic regression table for the WISC-IV). IOW, the difference, while noticeable, may not represent a meaningful finding. Any score between about the low 120s and mid 150s on the WJIII would be considered in the range for her VCI/GAI. (within 1.5 SD, taking SEE into account.)

    I would also note that

    1. she may be reading so swiftly that she is not always absorbing specific details.
    2. if the computer-adaptive test is using Common Core reading criteria, it is likely asking for a very specific way of demonstrating non-fiction ("informational text", in CC parlance) comprehension, in which she may or may not have received instruction. So that the particular narrow slice of comprehension measured by that instrument was not able to capture her expressions of comprehension, nor was she familiar with their methods of expression.

    One of my siblings reads like your DC does. I've observed this sibling reading, and notice that saccade activity appears quite different than that of other, more typical readers that I've observed, anecdotally. That particular sibling describes reading in whole lines, straight down the middle of the page. Incidentally, there is also a history of convergence issues. Watch your DC's eyes as she's reading, and then watch another skilled reader's eyes, and you may find that she is correct; her eyes may be moving far less, or in a different way, than others.

    As to whether there is a hidden concern, in need of remediation or accommodation--you are already working on clarifying the convergence/tracking category. More importantly, what is -she- concerned about? Is she happy in school? Not unusually stressed by her educational experience? Would you have been worried about her if you didn't know her achievement scores? Are there IRL concerns? Her academic fluency scores are not actually discrepantly low, by your report. Does she frequently have difficulty completing assignments/assessments in a timely fashion?

    The first rule of test interpretation that one learns is to use the child to interpret the test, not the other way around.


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    One aspect of your story that strikes me is your frequent mention of your DD being tired at the end of the day, suggesting you find her noticeably more so than typical? Gifted kids have amazing ability to compensate for learning issues: they create incredible workarounds and can look really effective. But doing so can be exhausting. We all get tired and less competent as the day goes on. However, I have learned to see that if my child seems to have skills in the morning that just aren't there after school, then they probably don't actually *have* that skill, but rather are using some intensive and difficult compensation strategies which are increasingly hard to sustain as the day goes on.

    My psych actually says she always prefers to test for learning disabilities in gifted kids at the end of the day, because they're not as good at hiding them.

    FWIW, my DD is far-sighted to a similar scale as yours, but got glasses when she was 6 (her eyes were starting to wander when focusing got too difficult). I thought they'd be impossible to keep on her; in fact she hasn't had them off since the day she acquired them. So I assume they make a notable difference for her. She can read without them - she tells me they don't change her focus or look of the text - but they make the text bigger and less tiring to read. She also has convergence insufficiency (and dyslexia). We did vision therapy overlapping with reading remediation. There were huge improvements in reading, and I believe - though can't prove!! - that the VT played a significant part in her increased reading comfort (not to mention rapidly evolving art skills). Certainly, before the VT, if you waved a pencil in figure 8s, or brought it towards her nose, or had her jump her sight from one object to another and back, in every case you could see her eyes jerking inconsistently all over the place and unable to stay focused on an object for more than a moment. This no longer happens, and we have to imagine that being able to move smoothly between words and lines has contributed to her major reading progress.

    There's a great summary of the evidence base - such as it is - for visual processing treatments; look at the 3rd last clinical practice guideline listed here, as well as the overview of vision-related learning issues (last item):

    http://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/caring-for-your-vision/clinical-practice-guidelines?sso=y

    The combination of reading tons, early, but seeming to tire out quickly is, as you note, the kind of thing you might expect to see when you combine a VCI so high that reading is super-easy, with something that also makes reading unusually laborious, like having to work extra hard to focus, or track smoothly. So, to echo aeh, whether you keep looking for something wrong depends on what you are seeing in real life. With a VCI like your DDs, the question may not be whether there are things she can't do, but rather, are there things you expect her to be able to do easily, but somehow seem harder than they ought to? And do they get increasingly harder as the day goes on and she gets more tired?

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    One quick CORRECTION, for clarity:

    "and by the beginning of ninth grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test"

    should read:

    "and by the beginning of 3rd grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test [Accelerated Reader STAR reading test]"

    Thanks, aeh! I have been lurking on this board for several years, and I had hoped you'd answer.

    This is the gist:

    "More importantly, what is -she- concerned about? Is she happy in school? Not unusually stressed by her educational experience? Would you have been worried about her if you didn't know her achievement scores? Are there IRL concerns? ... Does she frequently have difficulty completing assignments/assessments in a timely fashion?"

    And that's what's not clear.

    This last school year, things have been pretty good. In particular, one of her best friends from public school moved to her new school, and so she has that solid best-friendy relationship she really wants, and she has someone to work with on most of the big projects. I think she is very stimulated working together with another kid whom she likes and gets along with (in fact, the fact that she seems to work well with other kids and gets a lot out of it, is one of the main reasons I'm not homeschooling, even though there are some major problems at this school). I do not believe that the other girl is doing all of the work (though I don't know for sure) - my daughter is very engaged and knowledgeable, and fights, in a nice way, to do things her way. I think it's more that having some else to work with is fun and stimulating and that it lessens her perfectionism - if my BF thinks this is good enough, then I guess it's good enough (teachers won't be mad), and we can keep going.

    In 5th grade, there has been much less daily homework than in 3rd and 4th grades. With regard to some big projects that had to be done mostly at home - on 2/3, she has worked with the BF, which keeps her much calmer and more enthusiastic. But, as I alluded to before, at times during both 3rd and 4th grades (and once in a while during 5th grade), she's had crying jags over homework - starting too late in the evening, feeling overwhelmed. This almost always has to do with writing, although I think once there were some calculations / worksheety thing in science that was hard to understand. Oh yeah, and in 4th grade, occasionally upset over Khan Academy exercises, when she would make a mistake, sometimes a miscalculation but sometimes just pushing the wrong button, and having to start the 5-problem sequence over again.

    She is VERY affected by missing sleep, also by late meals. You could easily just say that a lot of this stress is a kind of perfectionism (rising to her own standards) combined with fear over teacher disapproval (teachers sometimes grumpy and unreasonable, in unpredictable ways).

    And yeah, she has had trouble with finishing things, sometimes. Sometimes I know just what's going on, and it's NOT about vision or even a bad kind of perfectionism. In 4th grade, a teacher assigned writing poems, several of them, in one weeks, and she tried to take a lot of care with them - plays on words, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, alluding to things without being blunt about them. The teacher said it should take only 30 minutes, at most, but she spent more than an hour and still wasn't finished. That was just wanting to write a good poem, and I thought that was fine, and it was more about a bad assignment and unreasonble teacher - why force a child to write 3 poems in 3 days, rather than 1 more satisfying and higher quality poem in 3 days? (No reason!) And during 3rd grade, when she was still in the public school gifted pull-out, the teacher was frustrated that she spent too much time "thinking" about her story before writing it down - she had a long plot with a lot of details that she hadn't thought out completely, but they were there in her head. And so other kids were starting their 3rd piece of writing when she was still on her 1st. I finally had to sit with her one weekend before the thing was due and have her dictate a "skeleton" to me, to show her that she either needed to cut details, or break to story into 2 or more parts, so she could finish one (it was to be "published" with the class'), and then I typed it for her for several hours while she dictated to me. That assignment was supposed to have been finished in class. That same year, she had been punished by her main teacher (not given candy when other kids were) for her bad handwriting, and that, in combination with the gifted teacher's responses to her, made her very resistant to writing, fiction or non-fiction, for about 9 months, until she got a better teacher in 4th grade at the new school, who coaxed her along and rehabilitated her really well. Now she's writing 14-page screenplays at home, so that's certainly better! Let's see what else - she wasn't able to write down the spelling list words in the time alotted in public school.

    Whether she's slower than average, I don't know. Whether she had (and now ocassionally has) crying jags and feels overwhelmed about her work, more so than the average child her age, I don't know. She plays it close to the vest at school, so the teachers there wouldn't necessarily know, and they're pretty disorganized so I don't necessarily trust what they say in either direction. (For example, an email will come out saying that your child should be finished with 3 out of 5 steps in a project, and DD#2 will be half-way through the 1st step, but then I'll find out that lots of other kids are at the exact same stage. Or they might not tell me, or even notice, if she's not finishing things as quickly as others.) It's in the evenings or on weekends, when I have her, when she tended to fall apart. Even at the worst times, in 3rd and 4th grades, I don't have to sit with her to do homework and projects more than I did with DD#1 (in fact, it's less so), but DD#1 has an ADHD diagnosis, so not the best person to measure against!

    I am actually kind of more concerned about the PSI tests than the achievement tests. The psychologist's report includes remarks that make it sound like she's going to have a tough life because of the disparity between PSI and 3 other indices. And do I see it IRL? I just don't know. Sometimes it does seem like I do. Now that they have very little homework (and since they have no standardized tests) and with a very flexible, warm language arts teacher, not so much.

    I appreciate your looking up the tables to tell me how (not) rare the VCI/GAI and the reading achievement tests - that's just what I was wondering. Of course, the fact that she ceilinged out on all of the GAI tests, the fact that her working memory test also yielded a high number (and thus could be helping her as well), and the fact that developmental milestones related to speaking (though not as much to reading) also indicate that VCI / GAI may be an underestimate puts a little more strain on the difference between possible potential and achievement. Not to mention, believing that there's only a 19/20 of 9/10 chance that the difference is indicating a problem, isn't super reassuring to a parent, even if it's scientifically reasonable to draw a cutof at that point. Especially because people say that vision therapy done younger is better, I feel a bit nervous about trying to figure out if vision problems are having an effect, so I can decide whether to try to do something about it.

    Some other issues that I didn't mention before: (1) She's used to have some trouble reading aloud - had to backtrack a lot - she has asked to read aloud to me a lot during the last couple of years (used to hate doing so before that time), so maybe she's been doing self therapy. Over time, she's gotten much better, but occasionally still has the trouble when tired, it seems. OTOH, is it more than most kids? I really have no idea. She was reading books aimed at adults to me often. (2) Her handwriting is sporadically fairly messy. She especially seems to have trouble with spacing words, and sometimes with consistent letter size. When she spends a lot of time on it, it's better (though not beautiful), but that takes time, concentration, effort. How will this affect SAT essay, AP exams later? How does it affect her ability and willingness to write now, while she's still on the cusp of learning to type well (22 WPM now - we keep working on it, because that saved me and DD#1)? (3) Difficulty with writing things sometimes, both her own fiction ideas for pleasure, and her non-fiction writing at school. She says she feels frustrated that she has stories and ideas and "worlds" in her head that she can't get down. Much better this last year, though. The way I think of it is this: maybe her executive function is just average for her age (and handwriting even weaker), but her ideas - she is extremely creative, as well as verbally gifted - are very big. And she has a whole childhood of reading long, complicated, often excellent books. When you're 8 or 11, comparing yourself with J.K. Rowling is really harsh! And even short stories that kids read are usually 5,000 or more words - that's a lot for an elementary school age kid, esp one with handwriting problems, to keep track of, quickly, and yet that's her idea of a short story. So it's like she has a really big toy close of 500 toys, and she's pulled them all out, and now she feels overwhelmed about cleaning them up. She might not have weak executive function - any kid would feel overwhelmed at organizing 500 toys. But most kids don't have 500 toys, so they don't feel overwhelmed as often.... (4) She has headaches occasionally. Also nausea. (I have pretty severe motion sensitivity, and we are now thinking it's possible that I've had mild vestibular migraines my whole life, though that's far from certain.)

    I do think she may be reading too quickly to get the details. And so long as that's just a habit that can be corrected, as we start to have her take practice standardized tests where the picky details are the whole point - DD#1 did Duke TIP summer classes and DD#2 really wants to qualify and go to the summer classes, so I'll probably have her take a couple of practice SATs, or the equivalent broken down into pieces, in 7th grade, before the real thing, to make sure that she understands that the picky details DO matter and has practice focusing on them - that's not a problem. Assuming that that is really the only issue.

    I took a look at her eyes the other day. They do move horizontally while reading, but I have no way to judge whether it's a normal amount, or a normal pattern, or not. Presumably the optometrist will be much more skilled. No one has specifically mentioned convergence issues yet. Just the tight eye muscles thing that the optometrist mentioned, and the "mild visual tracking" issue that the OT in 3rd grade screening mentioned.

    Platypus - thank you for your response. Super interesting about your DD's farsightedness Rx and glasses use. I will probably write more tomorrow, or soon, when I've had a chance to think more about your post.

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    One other thing: the 33 percentile PSI didn't include the Cancellation tests, which were super low (16th percentile to 5th percentile). I realize that if you test for enough stuff, you'll find "a problem", and the psychologist had not designated Cancellation tests to be included in PSI, so it's appropriate that she didn't put them in that. But again, what does a 5 percentile on Cancellation structured mean? That's another reason I felt I couldn't just ignore the possible vision issue, kwim?

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    One more In Real Life thing - she feels like she's one of the worst at sports. Of course, she's had little experience - my husband is now blaming himself for this, as he was the more sporty one. Part of this is just that you can't do everything in life, and we're older parents, so doing sporty things with her hasn't been something that's easy for us. I was never naturally coordinated as a child, I think, but I did play tennis for a while (my parents were fanatics) and we had a ping pong table in our house, that at least helped some. I am not sure how much "catching / hitting" a ball is related to the vision problems with reading (if they exist) or far-sightedness. But that is one other IRL issue that may or may not have anything to do with vision.

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    Responding (mostly) to Platypus:

    I don't know if it's more frequent. She's pretty sensitive and emotional, and strongly affected by lack of good sleep or delays between meals. When I took her to the optometrist last week, she was a little bit sleep-deprived, and I thought this was a good thing for purposes of good testing. She also had just gotten braces on, and was in some pain, so not in ideal form for that reason as well. But I only have one other kid of my own to compare with, and she had/has her own issues.

    Let's just put it this way. With a lot of intellectual challenge, and some emotional stress, in school, as part of a 7-hour school day and almost an hour on the bus, I'm not exactly surprised that a kid wants to do other things in the evening, her own intellectual and artistic projects, hanging out with family and pets, reading fiction books, daydreaming, outdoor play, instead of homework, esp if it's stressful. I think a lot of people expect way too much out of kids in this respect. With homework, it did sometimes seem to take her too long, but that's maybe because it just feels like too much, and then she's the kind of kid to get very emotional about that, and worried she won't finish, and that just makes it all worse.

    But it's really hard to judge. Just because *I* could write down some answers to open-ended questions quickly, doesn't mean a 3rd or 4th grade should be able to do so.

    And, as I've said, it was much better this past year. Maybe her far-sightedness has been getting better, and that was part of the improvement - who knows?

    The psychologist's report says that she will do worse when graphomotor + visual + speed requirements + fatigue are combined. I would add that she was in a new environment when being tested, relatively comfortable with the psychologist fairly quickly, but she does take a while to adjust to things and is very concerned about pleasing adults, so that kind of anxiety could also have affected things.

    This has definitely been the case at a new school in 3rd grade, and with new teachers who are not warm and reassuring.

    DD#2 is worried about the eyeglasses because she thinks she will be teased, and they won't look good, esp with the braces, while will make her doubly nerdy. I've told her not to worry, she doesn't HAVE to wear them at school, and if she finds that they are helping her a lot and wants to wear them more of the time, she could get contacts when she's older. (I have a -12 myopia Rx and started wearing glasses for myopia in 6th grade and contact lenses in 7th.)

    I have recently heard that kids with stats like mine (very high VCI or GAI, and PSI four standard deviations below) can also read 6+ years above grade level, but still turn out later to have stealth dyslexia and/or vision problems. This is what made me go ahead and get the optometrist appointment. The PSI subtests aren't relevant for dyslexia - am I right? Dyslexia seems like less a fit to me than vision problems do. But DD#1 has a type of epilepsy that is highly correlated with lots of stuff, including dyslexia / reading problems, and the research, such as at is, often extends to siblings and suggests screening for siblings. So who knows on that either... For now, working the vision angle is enough trouble...

    I'm kind of unclear on what parts of vision testing or vision therapy are controversial and what aren't. I think prisms are controversial, right? I know that everyone seems to agree that VT for convergence insufficient is a good thing (right?), based on apparently good research, but I'm not so clear on the other things. I picked this optometrist because an acquaintance MD with a daughter with convergence insufficiency was cured by VT, the MD acquaintance says.

    In fact, I'm having trouble at this point understanding the differences between different vision issues. Far-sightedness is presumably an objectively measurable thing, right? Am I correct in understanding that if she is getting tired out from, or having problems from, minor far-sightedness, it must be because she is having problems with accommodation that are not typical in a child her age?

    Does anyone have anything more to explain about this tight eye muscle thing? I imagine I will hear more later, but you know how medical professionals are almost always more rushed than you'd like, and if I go in understanding what she's talking about, I may be able to ask better questions sooner.

    Again, thanks so much for the note about your DD. I was starting to be skeptical when I read how most optometrists use +3.0 or even +5.0 as a minimum for treatment for far-sightedness.

    I'm not trying to create a problem where no problems exists, y'know? But all kids have problems, and at times, we have had fairly significant problems (just not as much recently, probably in part because I've devoted huge resources and our family makes large sacrifices, to make sure she gets the sleep she needs). There's never time during the school year to do as much as is possible in the summer, and I don't want to miss any "window". So that's why I'm pursuing this, even though the problems are less acute than a year ago, when we actually did the testing with the psychologist.

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    Short on time right now, so I'll have to come back tomorrow to follow up, but just a quick few comments (teasers, really!) and further questions:

    1. Since she ceilinged on VCI, did they also use extended norms?

    2. Low Cancellation does mean something. More on that later.

    3. Low PSI can be relevant for dyslexia, including stealth/compensated dyslexia.


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    aeh-

    1. The psychologist gave all regular tests and all substitute tests from the WISC-IV, but planned in advanced to use only the regular tests for the actual computations of scores; all subtest scores are recorded in the report, however. Here's what the report says about "ceilings." DD#2 "reached a ceiling on all but the Information subtest. If the discontinue rule has not been invoked, then it is likely that even more difficult questions could have been answered correctly if
    they had been presented. Thus, it could be expected that [DD#2's] verbal comprehension composite score would be even higher had the test had more questions. As such, her current Verbal Comprehension Index of 155 should be considered an underestimate of [DD#2's] true verbal ability." Although she did not put a similar verbal description like this with regard to the PRI, all 4 of the PRI subscores are ALSO marked "ceiling effect", just like all but the Information subscore of the VCI tests are marked "ceiling effect". I think this means that she missed questions as she went along, but she still ran through the end of each of these tests, without ever meeting the discontinue criterion (?). So I suppose that the PRI could also be considered a possible underestimate of her ability in that area (?). As to your specific question, the psychologist did apply extended norms, but the only subtest in which it made a difference was Vocabulary, where she scored 20. DD#2 often feels nervous about being wrong, and will not volunteer in most classes at school unless there is an objectively right answer to something and she is certain that she is right. So I had told her before the WISC-IV and WJ-III testing that there was no penalty for wrong answers and she should feel free to answer when she wasn't sure she was right and even just "guess". However, even though she felt relatively comfortable with the psychologist (one of the reasons I decided to get this testing done preemptively, because I knew that rapport could matter hugely for DD#2), DD#2 still told me afterward that she refused to answer some questions when she wasn't sure she was right. In fact, she was able to immediately tell me of some particular vocabulary words that she thought she knew but hadn't been willing to "guess" on, and I asked her to tell me what they meant, and her answers seemed accurate and articulate to me. So I am sure that a 20 on Vocabulary was an underestimate in that sense. I think the same happened on the Information subtest. For example, there is a calendar item on that test (this was later mentioned in the psychologist's report) that most younger children have memorized, but DD#2 wasn't sure of the answer, so she said she didn't know, but she would have gotten it right if had been multiple choice. She said the same thing about the Vocabulary subtest: "I wish it were multiple choice". Not so much because she couldn't recall the answer, but because she wasn't sure of the answer and didn't want to volunteer if she was wrong. I believed using the extended norm for the 20 on the Vocabulary subtest changed her VCI by a couple of points, but I don't remember exactly. It wasn't a huge difference. Apparently by age 10, she could run out all of the GAI tests, regular and supplemental (except Information), but missed enough questions along the way that the extended norms didn't make too much of a difference for her. Of course, now I wish I had had her tested when she was younger. I didn't have DD#1 tested until she was 13, really just as part of an ADHD evaluation (and with people not experienced with gifted kids who didn't even seem to know about extended norms), and of course, she didn't meet discontinue criteria on anything either. At least I got this one in at age 10.5.

    3. I misspoke. I can see that PSI can be relevant for dyslexia. But given that the Cancellation tests were dramatically lower (Symbol Search at 33 percentile, Coding at 33 Percentile, Cancellation Random at 16 percentile, Cancellation Structured at 5 percentile), I was thinking that this leans toward vision versus dyslexia (considering only those two things and not other possibilities like tendency to avoid all risk of error). Of course, the two Cancellation tests were the last tests of a couple of hour testing period.

    We had the second day of visual testing today. They didn't tell us anything, but will prepare a report and then we'll have a conference about it.

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    LaurieBeth,

    Did the psych who administered the testing include any additional tests to try to tease out why the processing subtest scores are relatively low? That's really a large discrepancy between PSI and her other scores - even if your dd's other scores had been significantly lower, the PSI scores are low.

    FWIW, some of what you wrote about your dd sounds a lot like my dd who has vision challenges (and who benefitted tremendously from vision therapy). Fatigue at the end of the day was one thing in particular. She also doesn't read word-by-word, but reads in blocks, and reads *very* quickly. Her vision has been remediated for some time now, and she loves loves loves to read (fiction and medical books lol), but she still has to work extra hard (compared to most people) to keep her eyes tracking. She also scored extremely low on symbol search on the WISC-IV (prior to vision therapy), but I also recall she scored extremely low on one other sub-test in either PRI or VCI that included a visual component. Sorry I don't remember which subtest it was.

    Let us know what you find out from the optometrist's report!

    Best wishes,

    polarbear

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