Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Breaking up testing over a few days

Hi everyone.

DD5's school is going to be testing her for giftedness. They said the process may take up to 2 weeks because they break it up and do it in parts, on different days, to avoid the kids getting tired. Does that sound like one of the normal tests (Weschler/Stanford Binet), or do you think they're using a different test?

I'm not actually fussed what test they're using (their school, their enrichment/gifted program, their choice of testing tool), I'm just curious.

Thanks

Hi Portia. It's not group administered, it's just for her. The school has an enrichment program and teachers refer students to the school psych for testing if they think the child might be gifted. We thought the program was only for older students because the school doesn't usually identify/test young kids, but then we found out from another parent that you can request that your child be tested, regardless of their age. And it's free! So we asked for DD5 to be tested.

It's probably because of her age and the school schedule. If I give a test of that nature to a small child, I monitor attention, energy level, and engagement pretty closely, and definitely have broken up testing into multiple sessions in response to their individual needs.

Also, if pulling a child out of kindergarten class time to do this, one sometimes has to work around constraints such as pulling them only from specials (gym, art, music), because teachers don't like missing instructional time, or, conversely, pulling them only from not-specials, because students don't like missing them, and won't give optimal performance under those circumstances. For example, a typical situation is that you can't take them from opening or closing circle time (so that's about 40-60 minutes of untouchable time there), or from the special of the day (another 30 minutes), or from snack (15 minutes). And, of course, the remaining time isn't necessarily contiguous. Especially if this is a two-and-a-half-hour half-day kindergarten, that makes it pretty difficult to complete testing in a single day.

Another practical consideration is the other cases already on the list ahead of her, who have due process clocks ticking. By law, the school psych may have to do those first (depending on where their deadlines fall), which may account for some of the two weeks.

This is all more detail than you probably need, but suffice it to say that, no, there is nothing odd about breaking up testing into two weeks of short sessions!

Awesome. Thanks aeh! I had no idea. Good to know

Well, we got the WPPSI III results back and they weren't as high as we were expecting, but they're fine.

DD5 scored 104 for verbal, which is actually great considering the test was administered in a foreign language that she's only been exposed to for a year.

Manipulation score was 125, which is fine.

But her processing speed was 87, which worries me a bit. I've always suspected she has a problem focussing. Most of my previous posts have been about this. The teacher said she was distracted, talking, drawing, etc. during the timed part of the test. She doesn't think DD5 has a problem, just that she's a little kid with a big imagination and a head full of ideas. She actually said it's really great the way DD5 makes connections between ideas and that her jumpy train of thought is really creative.

Is processing speed something that usually improves with age? Is her low score a 'kid thing' or possibly something else?

The good news is that her teacher said that even though DDs scores weren't the normal gifted profile, she would still like to nominate DD5 for the gifted/enrichment program because she thinks that DD is a very smart kid and that her scores were affected by the foreign language thing. So that's good, because entrance to the enrichment program was what we were hoping for

It's always hard to say with littles. They are still so inconsistently testable at this age that low scores can mean any one or combination of many things. It could be attention that's age-appropriate, or it could be a relative weakness. It could be that she's actually low in processing speed, or it could be that she had no sense of urgency for these tasks. Unless you are seeing IRL concerns that might be related to attention, speed, or fine motor skills, I would do no more than file it away in the back of one's mind, just in case. And even IRL concerns in those areas could be developmental.

Glad to hear she's being nominated to a program that you believe will be good for her.

As always, thanks aeh. We'll wait and see, and I'll keep it in the back of my mind.



Yup, she didn't know she was being tested which would have made a difference.