Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Figuring out test results

Hi,

From his results my son does not qualify as gifted but this place seems to be the only spot on the internet where helpful people make sense of weird test results, so I thought I would ask for help regardless.

Usual description of my son: "he is very bright, but..." (cue in ominous sounds). He was assessed last year by the school after a rough year in K and a disastrous start of first grade.

WISC-IV
VCI 99
Similarities 12 (75th)
Vocabulary 8 (25th)
Comprehension 10 (50th)

PRI 123
Block 16 (99th)
Picture 12 (75th)
Matrix 13 (84th)

WM 86
Digit Span 7 (16th)
Letter Num 8 (25th)

FSIQ could not be computed.

Subtest scatter (and catastrophic WJ results) were justified by the fact that he is bilingual and has been enrolled in a dual immersion program in a third language since K.

We spent the next months trying to get his English reading, writing and math up to age level to make him testable by non-bilingual (or trilingual) psychologists, and had him reassessed privately in the Spring.

I initially kind of skimmed through the test results while digesting a diagnosis of Asperger's, but looking now I am... puzzled.

He was given the DAS-II (since the WISC couldn't be repeated), which uses T-scores rather than scaled scores but the subtests seem to be similar in nature.

Verbal Subtests
Naming Vocabularies 62 (88th)
Word Definitions 63 (90th)
Verbal Comprehension 83 (99.9th)

Visual Subtests
Pattern Construction 71 (98th)
Picture Similarities 55 (69th)
Matrices 56 (76th)

Visual Memory Subtests
Recall of Objects Immediate 38 (12th)
Recall of Objects Delayed 32 (4th)

No composites were provided. Some weird scatter in the achievement tests, which average as... well, average.

Does this make any sense??

Welcome! You've got an interesting one there, and I'm not one of the local testing experts - but clearly your DS has very high marks on some subtests. Do you know the term "twice exceptional" or 2e? Looks to my non-expert eyes as though it may apply - gifted with learning disabilities as well, leading to a very complicated picture. You say you're digesting an Asperger's diagnosis? I don't know how much of what you see here is typical of that and how much is independent of it, but there are quite a few people here with gifted/ASD children. In the end sorting out the bad school experience matters, not the label, of course. How is that going? Is the school being helpful?

What was the processing speed on the WISC IV?

This is a very unusual set of scores...it looks like he's still in the expected 'verbal delay' part of multilingualism, and that area may rebound very strongly with your home education plan.

His working memory really concerns me. Was anyone able to explain what WM really means? It's more like the 'RAM' number on your computer, less like the capacity of the Hard Drive. It confuses people because they expect him to have a process with what we call 'memory' the ability to remember things from long ago, and more like the ability to pay attention to many mental details at once.

I just started a thread about 'Living with Low Working Memory'
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/111524.html#Post111524

so peak over there for 'general brainstorming' and we'll post specific ideas to help your child here.

Do you want to go into details about what was good and bad for your child about school? Also go into your relationship with the Asperger's diagnosis, ok?
It's painful, but you have to get it out.

If you suspect that you might be gifted, or you are interested in things that affect gifted children, that's enough to claim a 'permanent comfy chair' at this party. If you child was depressed or clinically anxious or ADHD or ASpergers untreated while taking the IQ test, I would encourage you not to expect the IQ results to say the same. Kids in these situations test with much higher scores after the issues are resolved in some way. If people notice that he is bright - then he is bright, at least.

In the meantime, what are you going to do?

Love and more Love,
Grinity

Hi SiaSl,
Clearly your son is very bright - especially in the non verbal realm. Was he given any speech and language testing to look at language processing? I wonder how potential snags in that area (if any) might affect his verbal reasoning.

I'd start by taking a look at this website to get an idea of your son's strengths: http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/Visual_Spatial_Learner/vsl.htm

It looks like he has some relative weaknesses in auditory memory (WMI of WISC) as well as Visual Memory. Again, I would want more information in this realm.

It's hard to say if there is any potential LD - you say his achievement tests in the average range - but average is very broad from the 25 to 75 percentile. Given his cognition, I'd be suspect of anything in the lower range. And again, I would want more info about memory. If he has difficulty with planning, staying on task, getting started - I'd also want some data on executive functioning. You say that K and 1st grade were disastrous - how so?

And Colon's mum asks the number one question!! How is school going and are they helping him?

Hi, Siasl--

If the school isn't doing anything for him yet, write to the principal (with copy to the district's special ed dept.) asking for a multi-factored evaluation and listing all areas of difficulty. This letter starts the ball rolling toward an IEP and proper services.

What are you doing so far for the Asperger's? Did the person who made the diagnosis give you a push toward therapies? My DS9 has AS and it has been very important to give him maximal remediation opportunities in these early grades. (Thinking about his kindergarten year still gives me the willies... but he's doing much better now. They can make so much progress.)

The other thing I was told by my DS's neuropsych is that you can expect test scores to both go up and become more coherent when autism is remediated. Autism makes test scores odd, not in the same way for each person, but once you work on the deficits, you get some clarity. We have seen this in DS's case; he is more able to show what he can do now that we've removed some of the obstacles.

HTH,
DeeDee

Wow, thanks for the replies. So much food for thought...

@Grinity: looks like I do qualify for my own comfy chair. I tested as gifted as a child, ending up with two grade skips, and underachieving happily ever after. Thanks!


Apparently nobody thought it worthwhile to test. What information would it bring? Not that I plan to reassess anytime soon but knowing the potential issues is always useful.


Well... We worked on reading, mostly (since school does reading in Spanish but he isn't fluent enough yet to have age appropriate vocabulary and grammar), and he is back to grade level, or slightly above. But despite my best effort English was always his primary language. So I have no idea how cramming on phonics (and doing "word a day" worksheets) could have brought a jump from 50th to 99.9th percentile in comprehension -- that difference is plainly insane. The jump from 25th to 88th in vocabulary, OK, maybe.

Although he is a perfectionist and gets extremely stressed out on timed tasks where he is not already perfectly proficient. The private psychologist might have been better at drawing him out of his shell?


Been there, posted a bit. The private evaluator (with whom he got the very worst results on visual memory) brushed it away as an artifact of testing. She said if she had been showing him pictures of reptiles he probably would have aced the test. She also ruled out LDs.


Yes. Painful is the word. The most confusing has been the looking in the mirror, I guess. He is a lot like I used to be, except more intense and more socially clueless. I heard this... diagnosis hypocondria (?) is a classic in fathers of recently diagnosed kids but then I am usually classified as one of the guys, despite my fully functional uterus .


Well, bright, or little professor syndrome? It is kind of painful watching him attempt to lecture completely uninterested mothers of toddlers on obscure points of animal care at the local mini-zoo. The adult level of conversation/abnormal interest in narrow subjects is a symptom of AS, after all.


All the questions about the school/what next.

The school.

Bad: behavior issues (not listening to the teacher, not following instructions, many conflicts with peers a few of which got physical, complete social isolation). K was a nightmare, and while he wasn't formally assessed he was probably clinically depressed ("Mom, why don't I have any friends? It makes me very sad."). Was sent home from school for safety/behavior issues at least once a week the first month of 1st.

Good: his 1st grade teacher implemented a behavior plan of his own (completely unassisted by the school, mind you) and had the right combination of firmness and flexibility needed to handle him. His 2nd grade teacher looks like she will be the same.

Academics... I have ignored those. My husband (type A overachiever) is engaging into some cramming. He has gone from a bunch of "proficient" (aka. at grade level) to mostly "advanced", especially in math.

This didn't show that well on his second round of achievement testing, results mostly in the 100-110 range, with one or two odd spikes above 140 and low point at 70 (sentence repetition -- maybe that WM thing is not just a testing artifact after all).


Next.

Go redo the IEP dance with the school to get help from a behaviorist. Last year's evaluation led to denial of service (all scores average smack at the 50th percentile, yipee!). The school lost all motivation to intervene when his teacher (who went above and beyond throughout the school year) finally figured him out. Once the behavior issues were under control (about 2 weeks before the initial IEP meeting) all the urgency that had pushed a fast and extensive assessment process just disappeared. The school psychologist, who had been the first to raise the possibility of AS, didn't even do the ADOS, although it was on the assessment list. That's what the private assessment was for. I am exhausted just thinking about it, and have been procrastinating on this far too long, actually.

And we are (finally!) getting into a social skills group geared toward Asperger kids. Reading about DeeDee's experience has been a boost to morale, thanks for sharing.


Well, if he is gifted -- still up in the air, and I read an article that was posted in the 2e forum on gifted vs. Asperger's vs. 2e that left me even more confused than I was -- it will be 2e, since it is hard to deny the Asperger's diagnosis. Social skills deficits and narrow/deep interests, check.


Wasn't there a recent Korean study that found a much higher than expected incidence of ASD (over 2%) and that 12% (!) of kids on the spectrum are gifted? ASD seems to push the middle of the bell curve outward on both ends.


Thanks for letting me ramble, this has gotten very, very long.

Part of the "over representation" of AS among the gifted and of the gifted among AS is a statistical artifact that results from the the fact that part of the definition of AS is that intellectual functioning is average or above, so you are really only looking at a population sample from the right half of the bell curve. Just from this, one would expect that the incidence of AS among the gifted (and vice-versa) would be about twice the rate in the general population. If the definition of "gifted" that is being used in the study is "top 5% of the general population IQ", then 12% being gifted is not that far off from what you might expect (around 10%)and a rate of AS near 2% is not so shocking, as many estimates put the rate in the general population at 1 in 150 (about .7%), and it is not hard to imagine that a gifted parent is more likely to 1) recognize that there may be an issue, and 2) have the resources to get appropriate evaluation and testing, which adds in identification bias.

The Korean study was done on a large population sample and the 12% were not for AS but for ASD in general.

Article is here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21558103

But you are right, the 12% is based on superior IQ (>120, top 8%) numbers in kids *who were in general education*, representing about 2/3 of diagnosed cases (although it is a bit more complicated than that). So 12% makes sense. Kind of (the data remains really weird).

SiaSL, you've clearly put a lot of good thought into absorbing the diagnosis. It's a lot to handle.


Well, that's good. AS tends to come with attention and processing issues built in; they're on the list of things to watch for at school. I guess at this point the proof is in the pudding: if you see executive function/working memory issues in real life (as opposed to the testing) you can deal with them.

My DS had, as part of his therapy, elementary instruction in following instructions. We would send him on errands all over the house (increasing complexity over time), and he had to do a job and then check back in to let us know he did it. This improved his ability to hold a task in his head for long enough to do it.


One of the interesting bits for us has been trawling through the family tree and noting where DS got various bits of the genetic package. And you know what, that mostly gives us hope. Yes, we are an anxious, perfectionist, absorbed-in-odd-topics, and (in part) socially clueless family; yet we are all functioning pretty well and even gainfully employed. That appears to give DS9 OK odds for the long term.


I sympathize. Mine went to kindergarten telling other children the Latin names of cloud formations and lecturing on astronomy. It was not all that fun.

Your job will be to broaden his world, to the extent you can. And yet-- I give you permission to sometimes just enjoy the astonishing memory and capacity for seeing categories in their complexity that comes with this territory. A kid like this CAN be bright or gifted. It doesn't fix the problems to be bright, the problems are still very real and take serious work (and as you've noted, "bright" can hamper others' recognition that there is a problem), but you might as well enjoy the ride you're on some of the time, too.


Those teachers sound terrific. And those bad spots sound awfully familiar. Sorry you're going through this...

Things that helped us most:
--private ABA therapy, with a case supervisor who is also willing to observe and strategize with school staff. We started with 4 afternoons a week in Kindergarten, have backed off to 2-3 afternoons a week. This yielded the biggest gains in skills for both school and life. It included structured play dates to build social skills in a realistic setting. Cognitive-behavior therapy can be almost as good, and can be important for a child who is depressed, because it teaches resilient self-talk.

--working with school until they understand the needs AND meet them. This includes the IEP, which guarantees legal rights I would not wish to be without at this stage.

BTW they should not be routinely removing your DS from school for disruptive behavior; it rewards the behavior by providing escape. They need to work out a plan (preferably with the behaviorist!) that will reward the right behaviors and discourage the wrong ones.

--medication for anxiety and attention. This vastly improved DS's ability to participate at school.

--a class for DS in third grade that taught about AS. He was feeling terrible about himself; it was incredibly consoling for him to learn that it was AS causing his problems, not that he was a bad child. In retrospect, I should have done this even earlier.


LOL. We completely ignored academics in K-2. We only thought about social skills. I think this was OK-- we put out the biggest fire first. After 2 it became clear that we needed to negotiate about academics too, but we're still glad that we dealt with the AS intensively in early elementary.


I hear you. Can you get those awesome teachers to make a list of interventions they're already making, and use the IEP as a way to ensure their continuation? Those teachers may also have ideas on what supports could make their lives and your DS's better.

Your DS may benefit from services from a SLP, if he has pragmatic language issues. Michelle Garcia Winner's curriculum is good for this. My DS has quite a bit of daily time with a special ed teacher pushed into the classroom who works on his weak spots.

We have at times had to hire a special ed advocate to get what DS needed.


Good! We have had mixed experience with these, depends on the skill of the person running it and what the other kids are like. (At worst: a whole group of kids lecturing reciprocally about reptiles. At best: real conversation practice and increasing self-awareness about "what I do that annoys other people."). Surely worth a try.

You might also like the discussion board at http://www.aspergersyndrome.org/ -- it has been important to my education.

DeeDee

One of the very many frustrations for parents, teachers, and others working with kids on the Autism spectrum is how unhelpful test results can be for this group of students.

Let me explain. A cognitive or academic assessment like the WISC or WJ may tell you something that you did not know your child could do. That is a possibility.

But you may never know what the child cannot do because of the way AS or the Autism spectrum interferes with testing. Some of the subtests are timed, for instance, and if the child gets stuck on a topic, a favorite line from a movie, or just perseverates, the subtest will give you very little in the way of useful information.

Also, depending on the severity, an assessor usually has to bend the rules so much just to get through the testing situation that the results are no longer valid when compared with same ages peers. My shorthand for referencing all of these issues is, "Autistic kids don't come in standardized."

Having said all that, as a middle school teacher, I often hear what holy terrors kids with an autism diagnosis were in elementary school, and find it difficult to believe when I see them in my middle school classroom. They are still autistic, though one of mine may have been mis-diagnosed, and another who wasn't no longer has any kind of plan. But they are doing so much better than they did in elementary school!

Autistic kids do have their challenges with verbal tasks. An autistic kid in a bilingual program is dealing with a double whammy, but taking him out of the bilingual program may not be answer. Every kid is different, and there are so many moving parts to that decision.