Hi Everyone,

My 5th grade daughter has shown interest in going into a gifted program for next year and we had her tested and the SCAT results were a bit odd. Quantitative came back as 99 percentile and verbal came back at 64. She has been accepted into the program. Is the lower verbal anything to be concerned about?

I'm very much a parent who lets my child do her own thing and I could tell that verbal wasn't a strong area especially after speaking with another child who had been tested for the program and that child has strong, complex sentence structure, so is it better for my child to work on verbal or let her go with what works for her since each child tends to have their own talents?

She's what I would say is a high-achiever and would work on verbal if I suggested, however, I don't want to ruin her interest in reading or burst a bubble by pushing vocab on her.

Thoughts?

Thank you.

Congrats to your DD on her scores!

While SCAT scores can be very affirming, especially the 99th percentile math score, I would not let this one test discourage you or your daughter from anything. It is just one day and one test. My math subject accelerated, DD7 has a 136 WISC score, with a 139 PRI, and just got her SCAT results back with a 29th percentile in math -- that's right, 29th percentile. On the other hand, her sister who just finished 7th grade, who is verbally gifted with a lower PRI, has scored anywhere from 63rd to 84th percentile on SCAT quantitative and from 60th to 84th percentile on verbal over the years.

As far as vocabulary, since she is in 5th grade, you might want to access some of the SAT vocabulary builders, and make a game out of learning a new word a day. You can potentially do something like this without pushing.

Good luck!

Thanks for your responses! We'll go ahead and try the one-word-a-day learning and see if she's into doing that. My younger child could benefit from that too as she is also interested in the program in a few years from now and I am wanting to prepare her.

I'm not sure what all the other tests are. Seems like, based on the posts I've been reading on this forum, that the children are all doing different tests than the ones given to the students at my kid's district.

IMHO, the SCAT is an odd test. My grade-skipped DD had unremarkable SCAT scores, but near-DYS EXPLORE scores.

Unless your DD wants to do some activity requiring a higher verbal SCAT score, I wouldn't do anything with them.