Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Newly Diagnosed, looking for insight

Yesterday found out my son has ADHD & ODD w/ anger issues. He tested in the gifted range with an IQ of 131 with a 149 in fluid reasoning. His Processing speed was 46 points lower than his fluid reasoning which the therapist said is not normal and likely due to the ADHD. Shockingly, he tested at the 11th grade level in math (he just finished third grade with a C- in math). We knew he was smart & has behavior issues but we are honestly shocked. The math blows my mind. Just looking for anyone out there that might have "been there". I feel alone.

If the math consists of a lot of rote exercise, then that's not a surprising outcome. In fact if he's that good at math he may know exactly how many problems to skip and still pass. Once a gifted person masters something, they have little patience for repetition. So it might be they just won't do the work, or they intentionally do it wrong. The gifted also have a quirky sense of humor, so there could even be some sort of joke embedded in the rebellion.

I would make sure that the ODD is not a misdiagnosis given the IQ. Gifted people can be pretty unruly, especially if not in the right environment. As an adult I keep going through periods where I think, maybe I'm not gifted, maybe I have ADHD, or ASD, or... lots of things. What I've learned is that the symptoms of giftedness overlap a lot with more common diagnoses.

I'm speaking from a place not of professional knowledge, but personal knowledge. I'm gifted+LD. At least that's what the paperwork says. Other people will be along who have great professional knowledge.

Of course, me being me, I like to get answers from a book. Most of my reading has been focused on the adult experience lately, but these might be helpful. I haven't read them personally, but they're on my to read list possibly--my daughter isn't quite 2.

Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults

Emotional Intensity in Gifted Students: Helping Kids Cope with Explosive Feelings

You're not alone.

I assume that the 11th grade math score you mentioned is a grade equivalent (GE). This means that his achievement is the same as that of an 11th grader at the 50th percentile. This sort of score is actually fairly typical for gifted kids at your son's age, especially if they have unlimited time. A GE of 11.9 is essentially mastery of 4th or 5th grade math.

Actually, grade equivalent means that her son scored the same as an 11th grader did in his grade level maths. It does not mean that her son is at an 11th grade level in maths.

Both of you have elements of correctness. It depends on the instrument. If it was an individually-administered achievement instrument like the KTEA, WIAT, or WJ, then Kai's explanation is essentially accurate. It means that he obtained the same raw score on this particular test that the 50th percentile of students of that grade equivalent did in the standardization sample. But remember that those types of tests are designed to order students against their age-peers, not to determine if they have mastery of all topics expected at a certain grade or age.

If it was a grade-level measure, like the ITBS, ERB, or SAT-10, or a computer-adaptive test with a low ceiling, like the MAP K-2 or 2-5, then Archie is closer to correct. It's the same concept, but with an even lower cap on item complexity.

Either way, though, the principal point is correct: grade equivalents very rarely mean that the student actually is prepared for instruction at that grade level (with the possible exception of criterion-referenced tests, which are not typically administered in this situation).

And other reasons a math-gifted student might obtain low grades in math include mind-numbing boredom. Drastically inappropriate instructional level can be very challenging for young children to manage, or even to identify accurately. Some develop perceptions of themselves as being "bad at" a subject because it's so far beneath their instructional level that they struggle to find it intellectually or attentionally engaging (my own story, early on, before an intervention by my parents). Others take it a step further, and perceive -themselves- as being bad.

I would likewise be conservative about the ODD (I'd view it as provisional only), as, between extreme instructional mismatch and weaknesses in self-regulation that accompany ADHD, what's currently perceived by adults as oppositional may resolve at least in part if his intellectual needs begin to be met. He would not be the first HG+ primary-age student to present with challenging behaviors principally because of an inappropriate instructional environment.

Hi all, thanks so much for your replies! It just helps to know there are people out there who know about this.

I don't know what type of achievement test he took and didn't think to ask. I do know it was a single administrator (one on one). We have to wait 3 weeks for the full report and will know more then.

He also told us my son had a Beery Tests of Visual Motor Coordination that was SS=88 Low Average Range. I have no idea what that means. This is new to me.

I have read on a university site (I can't​ remember what it was but had 'alpha' in its title) and they explained that the WIAT is the case as I explained it, which is the test I assume is being used here along with the WISC V. I shall try to find the link.

Perhaps I am not precisely understanding your explanation, Archie.

Regardless, the grade equivalents on the WIAT do mean that the student obtained the same raw score on the measure that the median (in this case) 11th grade, 9th month (nearly grade 12, IOW) student did on the same subtest in the standardization sample. As the test includes tasks of skill level roughly prekindergarten through high school (though he probably was able to skip over the easiest items), it is highly likely that a score at this student's reported performance level would have included correct answers on tasks above the third grade level. I can say this with a high degree of confidence, as I have administered and interpreted this instrument myself hundreds of times. In any case, the bottom line remains that using a grade equivalent is not recommended for meaningful interpretation of this kind of test.

From your description, I assume the website you reference is Ron Dumont's FDU page.

His website (with John Willis, also a major figure in the field) www.myschoolpsychology.com is an excellent source of information on assessment and many other topics in psychology. There he links to Pearson's official statement on age/grade equivalents, adhered to by all reputable assessment professionals:
https://www.pearsonclinical.com/lan...oblems-of-age-and-grade-equivalents.html

I should underline that I am not remotely downplaying the OP's child's mathematical gifts. Merely affirming that accurately determining instructional placement will require a different kind of assessment, preferably one based on the curriculum to be used. If you have access to placement tests for the curriculum used by the school, that would be the most straightforward approach to finding his level. Alternatively, if the school were amenable, he could compact through the curriculum by taking chapter/unit tests in sequence until his accuracy drops below 70%, which would also be an approach to identifying his instructional level.

Sorry, I'm confused. Let's say that OP's son is in 3rd grade. Are you saying that he scored that same score as an 11th grader doing a 3rd grade test; or that OP's son answered questions up to 11th grade?

Neither. The test has items leveled by difficulty (not by grade level) from approximately preschool up through some high school topics. Examinees start from an item expected to be easy for them, based on their grade, and test until they trigger the discontinue rule (based on number of items incorrect in a row). This generates a raw score, which is converted to age-based norm-referenced scores (the standard score). With regard to the grade equivalent, that same raw score can be compared to the median score obtained in the standardization sample at each grade level (not literally--the curve of median scores by grade level is smoothed statistically).

So the OP's child obtained the same raw score as the expected median raw score for an 11th grader on that task, which included items of varying difficulty, ranging from preschool to high school. A couple of other factors: The median 11th grader does not actually answer all items correctly at the 11th grade level, so median performance demonstrates mastery at a level notably lower than 11th grade. And it's the raw score that is the same, not the actual items. It's possible for two students to obtain identical raw scores (hence grade/age equivalents), but to do so by, say, getting every item right all the way up to the ceiling, at which a series of consecutive incorrect answers ends testing, or by scattered accuracy up to a very high level (perhaps without a hard ceiling at all), with numerous gaps in accuracy along the way (such as often occurs in students with executive function/attention weaknesses, those with gaps in formal instruction, or those with certain learning disabilities). The second student may actually have a higher level of academic potential, but many gaps or inconsistencies along the way, for whatever the reason.

In short, he answered the same number (number, not necessarily difficulty) of items correctly that an 11th grader would have on the same multi-grade-level test. An impressive feat, but not one that tells you what his instructional level is, or what his mastery of either 3rd grade or 11th grade content is.

From what I was told about the test aeh is correct. He was asked questions until he could no longer answer them correctly. He was asked them verbally and did not have scratch paper.

The test was given verbally. He answered the questions and the test stopped when he got a question (or questions?) wrong. He did not have scratch paper or pencil. That's about all I know. We will get a full written report in about 3 weeks.

We were also told he had a Beery Tests of Visual Motor Coordination - SS=88 (Low Average Range). Anyone know what this might mean? It's hard because we won't have the full report before school starts. I meet with his school next week.

Another way of looking at this is that there is a huge discrepancy between the math that an 11th grader at the 50th percentile knows and what we think of as "11th grade math."

It is not useful to compare gifted children's achievement to students at the 50th percentile. It is more useful to use the 90th percentile--that is, good students who probably haven't gone much beyond grade level instruction.

How does he feel about what's going on around him?

He thought the two testing days were fun and wants to know if he can take the test again. We have not told him yet that he has ADHD but will need to soon because we would like to try him on some medication soon. We will probably tell him tonight.

The compacting and chapter tests is how my DS was placed, but we used 80%.

The VMI is a fine motor task, probably given to investigate whether the low PSI was more a function of motor coordination or speed of information processing.The results support personal weaknesses in fine motor skills, at the low end of Average, and are probably sufficient to explain the PSI score (though they don't rule out other motor-free speed issues).

The achievement test sounds like it was not the WIAT-III, since no paper was allowed. Perhaps it was the WJIV. The WJ does have a high ceiling, which is good for this case.

We used 80% for our kids too, but some schools I know have used 70%.

DS has taken various achievement tests and scored at a high school equivalent at really young ages, like second grade. He did fine with a 3 year acceleration but I would not have gone higher than that. Basically in first grade he was learning things like long division, operations with fractions and decimals, etc. and by third grade he was learning middle school math. I think many high school students are just not very good in math, and still struggle with elementary concepts. So a gifted third grader will look like an average high schooler, even though the third grader would not be ready for a high school curriculum. Just goes to show how bad math education is, that so many high schoolers score so low and can't even understand elementary concepts..

Beery VMI has a few different scores, one of them measures "motor coordination", another measures "visual perception" and another is "visual motor integration". It's a lot of tracing, copying patters, manipulating small objects while being timed, etc. DS always does very well with visual perception and horrid with coordination, and he has a diagnosis of Developmental Coordination Disorder. His overall score averages out to be fine, from what I can recall, but the motor coordination subtest is really bad, like a standard score of 65.

Forgot to add, In terms of processing speed, my kids also have huge gaps. My daughter's perceptual reasoning score (on the WISC IV) was around 147 and her processing speed was something like 91. She has ADHD and the processing speed issue is clearly evident when she is doing math and is very slow with recalling math facts.

DS also had a big gap, but I think his is more related to his poor motor skills and not being able to do the motor tasks of the test, for example at least one subtest involved writing with a pencil.