Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Testing and its application!

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I am looking forward to seeing what insights aeh may have to share in response to your post, Klangedin.

I tried to PM aeh to draw their attention to this thread, but unfortunately received a message that aeh is over their limit for Private Messages. Therefore I am hoping that my post will help draw aeh's attention and response.

Clearly I am long overdue for some inbox cleanups!

Some context: the field has a long-running conversation regarding how much weight to put on measures below the global measure, and whether the domains are sufficiently robust to interpret. So keep in mind that the most psychometrically sound measure is, all other things being equal, still the global one (the FSIQ on the WAIS/WISC/WPPSI family of instruments). This is not by accident, btw, as the original author set out principally to obtain a good measure of g. The indexes emerged in stature later, mainly through the work of his successors (notably Kaufman, who is best known for his work on the WISC-R and -III).

That being said, there is data to support the four domains identified by the WAIS-IV, although there are, again, ongoing discussions about what they actually consist of. Some are more obvious. VC has pretty good general consensus that it mostly is related to verbal reasoning, but with overlay effects from an individual's access to rich langauge sources over the course of their history. It seems to be reasonably predictive of language-based achievement, for most people (e.g., reading, writing, communication)--but not everyone. PR appears to be mostly related to nonverbal reasoning, with a heavy visual component. It seems to have some connection to mathematical achievement and mechanical skills.

WM and PS are a bit more ambiguous, mainly because a lot of different attributes or conditions can affect them. For example, WM can be lowered by attentional dysregulation, such as that found in persons with ADHD or other executive function challenges, but it can also be affected by emotional interference. And some people do well on WM but not on other measures of memory, or vice versa. We do know that tasks in this category are often reflective of a person's phonological loop, which is the length of sequential auditory information that you can hold in short-term memory, prior to transferring to long-term storage. A longer span turns out to have significant correlations to strengths in acquiring fluent phonetic reading skills, as well as in math achievement.

Here I'll throw in an example of a divergent profile that might be familiar to some readers: persons with high VC and low WM might (not always, as there are other factors too) be among those who are quite strong in oral language and comprehension or expression of complex verbal reasoning, but struggle to learn basic reading or spelling skills. Sometimes they can discuss topics at a high level, but generate unexpectedly simplistic written language.

PS likewise has many possible pathways to lower performance (which is why clinical observation and interpretation by a skilled professional are important). A lower score might result from fine-motor difficulties (the physical act of generating the responses efficiently), or visual perceptual difficulties--especially tracking, or decision speed, or anxiety/perfectionism, to name a few. WAIS's PS can also be described as clerical speed, to emphasize that not a lot of reasoning is involved in it. There are some other speed tasks that involve other skills, such as various types of retrieval fluency measures (verbal fluency, naming items based on a provided category; naming fluency, naming images of familiar items or symbols, computational fluency), with or without the fine-motor component.

Whatever PS is truly measuring in an individual person, it does appear to have some patterns of need areas. When it's not mainly motor speed, weaker performance in this area does sometimes appear to play out in real life as difficulty keeping up with the pace of interpersonal interactions of various kinds, both academic and social. They may be able to descrie appropriate social reasoning and perception in the hypothetical, but find that the speed of real life passes them by before they are able to read and respond to social situations.

Your own profile includes some qualities not assessed in much depth on the WAIS (e.g., verbal flexibility). I would submit that the challenge area in flexibility (what we call "shift") may be more impactful than the slow speed itself. And the way you've phrased it suggests that the low PS is a symptom or result of the low shift, not a cause. It may be helpful to learn a collection of clear but socially-acceptable verbal requests for wait time, so you don't feel rushed when you are generating a communication. For example, "I'm thinking," "give me a moment," "let me give that some thought," "I'm going to give that the time it deserves." Or you can buy time for adapting and processing by reflecting what you've heard back to the other conversational partner: "So what I hear you saying is..." "If I understand correctly..."

I have a standing interest in the different ways the SBV address WM vs the WISC. And what significant differences may imply. My children all have relatively poor, or actually poor performance on WISC WM, with good to gifted range results in the SBV WM. This seems to be related BOTH to numbers vs words, and to how meaningful the content is. They can't retain things that aren't meaningful to them. All of them learned to read more like each other than how schools insisted kids learned to read (context driven not word driven). This was true of my very dyslexic child, with the lowest VC of my kids, and even more true of my exceptionally verbally gifted child.

As beginner readers the hardest words in a sentence were "the" & "and", and other words that convey no meaning on their own. Faced with "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" the hard words would be "the" & maybe "over" and they'd quite possibly struggle with "the" both times it appeared.

Once cracking reading, and with typing provisions, they did not go on to have limitations in written expression, far from it, even the dyslexic child. Actually my child with the highest digit span (by two standard deviations or more) has the most trouble with written expression, even with typing. Interestingly, now that I have checked: this child has the lowest WM scores on the SBV, though their WM scores are closer between the two tests than my other two, who had dramatic differences between WISC & SBV WM.

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I'm glad your recent explorations have helped bring some of your life experiences into focus. You should be especially proud of your endeavors over the last year toward growth, and giving yourself a wider reportoire of skills.

And I would agree that sometimes (perhaps, often) the label for a condition is less important than whether it is helpful in improving one's functional experience of self, other and one's place in the community.

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