Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional achievement test tester recommendations?

Hi Everyone:

I am new here. I have been lurking on the board for a few days reading the posts, reading and learning a lot about some of the same issues (perfectionism, 2E, academic challenge) that I have been struggling with as I raise my kids. I have learned a lot from your posts, so thank you. It seems like such a wonderful, kind, helpful board. I would love to get your input.

I have a question I was hoping to get help with. (Actually I have a lot more but I don't have time to ask them all right now!) I wanted to see if you think it would be appropriate to re-test (perhaps with a different achievement test if re-doing the same one skews the results?) to see if my son would be eligible for the young scholars program.

My 8 y.o. son was given IQ and achievement tests by his school last year when he was being evaluated for OT. He scored above 99.9th percentile on the verbal comprehension portion of the WISC IV with a score of 152 (missed one question, well above the young scholars cut off) and 99.7 percentile on the reading portion of the WIAT-II, with a WIAT reading score of 142, just below the ditd young scholars cut off of 145. I think he could really benefit from the young scholars program, so I'd like to have him take another achievement test. He missed lunch by about two hours on both days of testing, so I figure he may have just been one PBJ sandwich away from eligibility. What are your thoughts and do you know of any testers in NYC who would do this?

Also, he has a tendency not to want to try anything in front of anyone else that he hasn't already mastered. I think he is afraid to try anything where he won't look smart or where he might have to struggle just a bit. (The school district tester noted in her report that he would not attempt any math problems he had not been taught.) I am looking for a tester that could coax him to try new things. He did score 98th percentile on the WIAT math reasoning subsection.

Ever since we became aware of the perfectionism issue, we have tried to praise effort and stretching rather than inherent intellect. Lest we seem like pushy parents who have created this perfectionist child, let me explain we have never tried to push any academics or particular achievement but rather have let him delve into whatever intense interest he has at the moment. All we told him about this test was that he did really well.

At any rate, do you think it would be worth re-testing? Can you recommend anyone in the NYC area? I'll follow up on other days with some of my other questions.

Thanks,

POJ

Hi POJ,
Welcome!
I have gotten so much out of interacting with other parents through the YSP, and I encourage you to submit an application as is, and see what they reccomend. The alternative is go try a different achievement test, but I would, perhaps, advise waiting a few months and doing a bit of "catch up afterschooling" first, perhaps something as simple as using an online Math program to "Zoom" him a head in math. (www.aleks.com is cheap, and has a free trial, EPGY is expensive, but the gold standard - either is good)

I've been reading Sylvia Rimm on reversing underachievement, and accorting to her, underchallenged kids look just as stressed as overpressured kids. I know that I went out of my way to avoid any suspision of "hot housing" my child, or being a typical pushy parent. I regret this now for a few reasons. ((Big Confession Time))

1) Kids NEED their parents to have reasonable expectations for their academic growth. In our population, reasonalbe expectations will look "really mean" to other families, but the result of not providing these reasonable expectations are disasterous. In our case, we had a stressed out kid, who didn't "know" himself, who was getting the unspoken, and unintended, message from Mom and Dad, "fit in at any price" "don't make waves" and "academics aren't that important."
2)Schools understand kids who can "do math" and "read at an X grade level" better than "kids who have memorised all the dialoge from Monty Python" and "kids who know every lyric from every Simon and Garfunkle song." I realize now, that in encouraging our son's attention to these "little side allyways" of intelligence, we did not help the school understand that he is anything beyond "we have lots of bright kids."

3)We actually planned to leave "school stuff to school" as in "giving Rome her due" in the hopes that Giftedness was some kind of taint that we could try not to pass on to our child if we worked really hard at it. We verbalized it as - we don't want him to be bored at school, so we had better not show him anything about math or reading. I am very grateful to my son and to the YSP parents for showing me that being Gifted isn't my fault. I didn't choose to have this style of brain. I hadn't been being obnoxious for wanting to learn at school. It was actually the adults responsibility to notice what I was ready to learn, and to provide it. Wow! I can remember being so impressed while I was dating my husband that he could "get along so well with such a wide variety of people." I wanted a marry a guy who could teach my future children how to "act right" and not be disliked because they were different. LOL! I'm glad my attitude has changed a bit since then. %)

4) Afterschooling teaches you how your child learns. Afterschooling relieves the stress of an "underfed hungry mind." Afterschooling to his readiness level increases the willingness to try something new. Obviously a tester who is good at working with perfectionistic gifted kids MAY be able to coax a few more points out of him, but to me, I wouldn't spend money and time on it when you, yourself (or a tutor 2x a week) can actually start fixing the problem. BTW - expect "tantrum" type behavior. I can tell you that an 8 year old who hasn't learned how to work hard at learning and finally gets a chance will "show" you exactly the depths of their pain, as you are leading them out of their little dark corner. I'm thinking of Harry Potter living under the staircase at the begining of the first book, with the spiders. Plan on some kicking and screaming. One little boy put it "I'm not having a tantrum - this is the sound my brain makes getting it's gears unlocked!"

In the long run, I think you would benefit from the YSP. I encourage you to apply, now or later. If your son doesn't qualify eventually, we are still here to answer the same questions you would ask there.

So - I invite you to decide not to decide about finding a tester right now. Even if you had qualifing scores in hand, you would be months away from an acceptance letter. Let me gently, i hope, direct you back to the "what's the thing that is within your circle of influence that is most pressing?" Of course, download a application and start filling it out, start handing out those letter of reccomendations, but for now, write back about what is your main concern right now. Is your son melting down at school? Do you want to start, or extend afterschooling? Is there some kind of emergency situation right now? Or are things lumbering down the wrong road? What has you up at night worrying?

Love and More Love,
Trinity

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/psychologists.htm#uny
lists these folks from the NYC area:
New Jersey
Barbara Louis New Brunswick
Located at the Gifted Child Clinic in the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, e-mail louisba@umdnj.edu, phone: (732) 235-7700

New York
Julia Osborn
Clinton St., 1K, Brooklyn, NY 11202, phone and fax: (718) 522-4824

Patricia Schuler Creative Insights
1 University Pl # 5, Rensselaer, NY 12144, phone: (518) 257-2018

We could not afford testing for our homeschooled child and the only thing we had was a WIAT achievement test (taken in one sitting by a child with sensory issues, vision issues (required vision therapy), and the problem with perfectionism. The psychologist told us that my then seven year old son wouldn't use the pencil and paper to figure out math problems and he thought he would have done better if he had, but still made 99th percentile on that portion of the test. He had handwriting difficulties and visual motor integration at the 1% level so I don't think it was surprising that he had problems with writing numbers. I know this embarrassed my son and he would refuse to do things that required writing. My son's reading score was higher than the math but he was actually able to read at a much higher level than what the test showed. His eyes tired very quickly and the tester told us that he needed to be retested over several days because of fatigue issues. His test was given in the afternoon and he was also hungry. I do think this affected his scores also.

We couldn't afford further testing. Our insurance paid for one only test. I explained all of this in our application and portfolio that we sent to Davidson. I think they want to help twice exceptional kids.

They accepted our achievement test and application and letter of recommendation and now they say they need original pieces of the applicant's work that demonstrate his advanced abilities. They accept video tapes so I plan to get a video of him reading college level textbooks and practicing for a spelling bee and a few other things. I had only sent in some things that he had dictated to me and they say it has to be in his handwriting. Since my son has to use so much of his mental energy in writing I think he will have to type what he writes first and then copy it. I am so glad that he learned how to type.

Hi poj,

I think you should apply to the Young Scholar program with your son�s present scores. I think the DITD staff might understand the pbj issue. Good luck.

Hi Poj,
I just realized that you posted under the "2e" topic. And you mentioned OT eval. How is that going?

LOL Lori -
Ds and I have done that many a time. I did that type/write thing for my wedding thankyou notes way back went!

((shrug)) It gets the job done, i guess.
T

Wow. I thought I might get one or two responses. Thanks so much for your advice, everyone.

Dottie:
His WIAT total reading score was 142,and his pseudoword decoding (126) was his lowest scoring in the subtests. All subtests were lower than the composite score, perhaps his composite reading score was higher because he was almost uniformly good on all of the subtests?

Also, thanks for the advice on the WJ including timed sections. He really struggles with handwriting or anything requiring fine motor skills, so a timed test wouldn't work for him. I actually think that is part of the reason he didn't score as well on the perceptual reasoning section of the WISC and the numerical operations section of the WIAT. He was precocious in math as a toddler, preschooler and kindergartner, and I can't imagine that all just went away when he hit first grade (even though it doesn't show itself that often any more.)

Trinity:

One of our big issues is very poor fine motor coordination. I think he has reached the point in school where he really needs to be able to write, so it is starting to interfere with how he is doing in class.

For example, the school did pre-testing and grouping for his second grade math, so at math time, kids would switch from homeroom to the teacher who taught their level math. He never did well on the tests because he simply did not write fast enough, I think, or reversed his numbers or put them in the wrong columns, and sometimes even skipped questions, so he always wound up in a math class covering material he already knew. On the WISC and WIAT his math-related scores ranged from 87-98, but with 76 kids in first grade, he was placed in the second- or third-highest of the four math groups. He wasn't in the group of top 16 kids and sometimes wasn't even placed with the top half of kids. For his group's geometry section, they looked for rectangles in their room, and he and another boy sat at the back of the class and talked about Dragonology. Until the OT evaluation, I didn't really have anything to support my claim that he should be in a higher math class -- and should be taught at a faster pace and perhaps given more material -- because they had those objective tests that "showed" he didn't know as much. In my neighborhood of pushy, overachieving parents, I would have been just another parent demanding my kid be switched into the higher class. I will feel more confident about demanding this next year, now that we have these test results.

His struggles with handwriting are also affecting his other subjects. His school uses the Writer's Workshop model, so he is expected to write -- a lot -- about what he reads (luckily, they have been pretty accommodating about letting him pick his books from the library and home) and write fiction and non-fiction.

His teacher suggested we request an evaluation for OT services, which we did this spring. The OT evaluator didn't seem to do much testing, honestly -- it seemed more like she looked at him writing and decided he should get OT. The IEP was faxed to me the day after school got out. His IEP essentially says he should be given OT twice a week in 30 minute sessions, after school, and get a scribe and 2X time for completing tests. It also says they will seek input from the treating OT as to whether other modifications are necessary. Therapy will be paid for by the school district and will occur only during the school year.

I really know so little about handwriting issues, so I don't know if this IEP seems reasonable and if the OT will be making the right recommendations, so I'm hoping as the school year goes by to get your feedback on what is happening -- I thought this might also be one area where the young scholars program would be helpful.

I DO know that he has responded very badly to all my attempts at home to have him practice his handwriting, or pursue any academic area that didn't interest him. He gets sullen, teary, uncooperative. I take your point about pushing him to the point where he is challenged and I just looked at Aleks and I think I will try that with him -- perhaps if he is not getting the instruction from ME, he will be more receptive.

I am so leery of pushing because of something that happened when he had just turned four. One Saturday, he called me into his bedroom, where he had a bunch of alphabet letters. He explained how reading worked and proceeded to put together many different words, cat, cot, lot, bot, bat ... on and on just changing one letter to produce another word with a short vowel sound. After a prompt from me, he added two-syllable words with short vowel sounds that didn't repeat any letters. (It was an alphabet, so only one of each of the letters!) This went on for more than an hour. I was really excited for him and he seemed to have such a good time, I decided to introduce the concept of silent e to make a long vowel sound. He didn't get it. Within five minutes, he said he wasn't interested in doing any more. He did absolutely no more reading until kindergarten, when he suddenly started reading again at Level P. He wanted me to read books to him in those intervening years, but he would refuse to do so much as sound out a letter.

Reading the book Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, I got some insight into this behavior. From the moment he could talk, he has been having people tell him how very smart he is, and he's never had to struggle to do all of those things that made total strangers tell us he was smart and he should get tested, or go to their kids G&T program/school when he was older. So much so, that he would introduce himself by saying, "Hello, I'm _____. I'm tall and I'm smart!" It was a big part of his identity and he loved the exclamations he would get from other people by identifying obscure dinosaurs or imagining in the sandbox that he was drilling through igneous rock that had been hurtled by his volcano onto the sandstone, which is a sedimentary rock.

All of a sudden, with this incident with reading, he went from showing me how smart he was to not getting something and feeling less smart -- so he simply stopped. From reading Teaching Gifted Kids, I realized that I needed to show him that there is also value in trying, not just "being," and I've tried to emphasize that, and that I think it is great when he is struggling to learn or do something, because it shows he is really challenging himself. Instead, he still seems to just panic and shut down. I'm thinking that if he could have that struggle -- just not in front of me -- he might react better. That's why I think Aleks might work.

At any rate, I think I have half-discussed two of the issues we're facing. For the handwriting, do you have any books or resources you would recommend, and for the fear or trying anything challenging that makes him feel less smart, any strategies to get him to try new things and work at a challenge level?

Once again, thanks so much for your responses.

It sure seems that this is what's going on. But remember, that you are very close to the age where keyboarding is going to be a viable option. I started bribing my son to practice "Mavis Beacon" at age 7, and by 9.5 he was touchtyping with ease, at about 100 wpm. I don't honestly know how a regular school could have helped him before he learned to type because he couldn't have done much subject acceleration without the typing - we kept him in public school, but he had a rough time of it. For him, his handwriting was messy and ugly and hard to read, and it hurt his hand to produce. The teachers wanted him to fill out worksheets in full sentences that echoed back the question, and he wanted to put "one word answers." Now that he is 11, with a single gradeskip, he lives in a "laptop" academic environment, where his homework is emailed to his teachers, and notes are taken on the laptop. He reports that his handwriting has even improved some. I wish that there had been a way for him to have both his typing skills and developed his handwriting, but I do want to reassure you that if you can help him develop his typing, it will solve many of these problems.
Oh! I am so sorry this happened to him! It's really good that your school has Math Groups, although I doubt that even the top grade level Math will satisfy him in the long run. It will be interesting to see how the school reacts to the "new information" - one one hand the test results may be enough, on the otherhand, you may have to point to the IEP and say: I want the test redone, with a scribe, and 2x time. Interestingly, I always see the ability to not switch the numbers, or to keep the columns straight as one group of skills, and getting the ideas of math as another group of skills and perhaps memorizing times tables as a third- and that it's fine to zoom ahead in whatever skills area one is ready for, but my son's teachers have rarely agreed with me.
Again it's a really good sign that they let him pick his books. I think that your school has some potential, once they start to apply what they know to your son's unique situation. Print out the Davidson's guide book to advocacy http://print.ditd.org/Guidebook1.pdf
and start highlighting!
This IEP sounds excellent. I would insist that they add Typing Instruction and access to a keyboard when his typing becomes good enought to use as a tool. Is there someone at the school that you can talk to? Seems that they really want to have things in place by next year...is anyone around that you can talk to this summer?
The IEP sounds like a very reasonable place to start. It's true that the other YSP parents will say - yes, "asynchronous development" has been an issue for some of our kids. and yes, for some of us OT helped, and yes, for others of us we gave up and went straight to keyboarding. That is a very helpful thing. It's ok to accept the lable to get the needed services, but it seems like this is so common, that it's more of an "alternate path to development" than a disability. The one other thing they will say is to try to balance the attention on the challenge areas with a chance to really move in the strength areas. Perhaps you son will enjoy doing OT excersises more if sometimes he is practicing the Greek alphabet and looking up what each of the letters mean in science. That sort of thing.
I call this the Goldilocks problem. Once they have been left unnacomidated for so many years, everything seems "too hard or too easy, too rough or too smooth." Thats why the Moms who have brought their children home to school at this point have long periods of "unschooling" where they toss out the TV and lock up the video games and just do trips to the library, and let the kid heal before they start any kind of pushing. I'm not sure you have gotten to that point - and you might hunt around a bit before you take that drastic step. I like to use the "principles of unschooling" in my afterschooling attempts, and try to follow my son's interests 2/3rd of the time, and push my own agenda - typing practice 1/3 of the time, but of course - his 2/3 come first. I take the attitude that I can twist anything he's interested in to meet my goals, but unfortunatly, this is somewhat of an exaggeration.
I don't think you did him any harm. As you try and try again, you will learn how to read him better. Think about this- all the other children have had use of those elementary school years to learn how to fight for learning - he's just learned to defend himself. His education so far has not led him to trust adults or himself. It takes a while, but you are making giant steps forward.

I think that you are exactly right, and all the more reason to teach at home, so he has lots and lots of opportunities to feel this frustration, and hopefully, handle it more maturely that he did when he was 4. The more you provide him with chances to learn what he wants to learn, the more you are building his trust. Also, read anything by Sylvia Rimm, your above example could have come right from one of her books.
He may actually want you next to him during the Aleks, or he may not. One of the terrific things about Aleks is that now, being careful is being positivily rewarded with one of the strongest motivators out there. I found that my son couldn't teach himself new material using Aleks, but I was eventually in a position where I could gently suggest that he "ask nicely" if he wanted my help. There was a lot of babyish temper tanturms before that point, but I figured "Who better than me for him to have them with?"

Best Wishes,
give it a try and let us know how it works out!
Trinity

Thanks so much for these thoughtful and helpful responses. I think we will not try for any additional achievement testing for now. I will have him try Aleks and try to get him on a typing program. I tried in first grade and it didn't work -- but he's older now and I will be adding bribery to the mix! And I think you've helped me feel less bad about the whole preschool reading fiasco!

I will keep you posted. Thanks so much for helping. I really appreciate your kindness.

Excellent Poj!
I would encourage you to fill out the Davidson YSP application in "babysteps." LOL - It took me 6 months to do mine, and you can bet that I felt really badly about that - but the Staffers told me that that is about average. I was suprised.

I used the typing to teach a deeper lesson to - about the tree ((bamboo, rubber, who knows?)) that spends three years putting down roots with no sign of activity above the surface, and then in the third year grows ((insert amazing amount here)) feet!

We started at age 7, and worked at a for 2 months every 6 months or so, whenever the urge for "more money" or "more TV time" or "more computer time" overcame his resistance. Of course I was lucky, because being suspisious of the Commercial World by nature, I had instituted a "twice a year" gift policy, sports and art supplies not included. When I saw that the neighbor-kids got 40$ video games from the Easter Bunny, I knew that times had changed. Too all the whining I say - "My Job is to love you and help you build Character." I know it's working when I hear - well I've got plenty of Character, but what I want is that new video game. I know that he can't seriously defend that position, even to himself. But he does get to complain.

Poj, I look forward to hearing updates. We all are. Welcome.
Love and More Love,
Trinity