Just a question from a parent who is still somewhat skeptical of the WPPSI score and what it means moving forward. I hope some of you that took the test could provide some testimony as it pertains to your situation. FTR we took the WPPSI at age 4.5 because we were curious to see if we needed to consider alternative schooling. Did anybody else do this and how did this information correlate to your child's trajectory? I know you can score lower based on a number of factors but can you test high on these things? Also, how did that "all kids will even out by third grade" axiom pan out? TIA!

Huckleberry, I may be in the minority here, but one of my dds had her WPPSI score (taken at 4.5) decrease significantly - across the board - when she was tested with the WISC in 2nd grade. She's also since then taken the WJ-III Test of Cognitive Abilities and it is more in line with her WISC score than her WPSSI, and her experiences in school lead me to believe the super-high WPSSI scores (for her) weren't accurate. OTOH, I haven't heard of many other kids *at all* who've had the same experience.

JMO, but I wouldn't think too much about the WPSSI scores for now, but instead take the queues from your child. Honestly, even if the scores do hold up and were 100% accurate... it will most likely be tough to predict now where your child will need to be in a few years - children and their needs are all so different, and IQ #s are only one part of what makes up your child. Even two kids with the same IQ likely have very different strengths and challenges.

FWIW, the way I've always understood the "third grade" bar is that it doesn't mean all kids are thought to suddenly be the same iq/ability... but instead means that around 3rd grade is the time you start to see most kids fall into where they will ultimately be based on ability - so for instance, a child who started reading late but is going to be a great ahead-of-grade-level student in reading will be at that level by 3rd grade - but way back in kindergarten might not have been reading yet. Another child, otoh, who started reading at three might not end up in the "top" reading group in third grade because they were an early reader, but weren't ultimately a hugely-over-the-top-in-ability reader. That's a bit of an exagerated example to make a point - but fwiw, that type of "evening out" absolutely did happen in my children's classes.

Can you tell us a little bit about your child - what are your concerns about your local schools, what is he/she doing now, does he/she start K next year or is he in school this year? And I just realized.. if I look back at your other posts I could probably find that info! I apologize, I don't have time to do that right now - will do it later. I was just thinking we might be able to help with more specific advice that would be helpful now rather than guesstimating whether or not a WPSSI score will stand the test of time.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Huckleberry - My DD did the WPPSI at 4.75yrs, her score was in the (just barely) HG range but we felt there had been a spoiled subtest and not great rapport with the tester, and school were being difficult. So she then did the SB5 at 5.25 and scored more than half a standard deviation higher, into the DYS range on FSIQ. Due to our strange school start system where a child must do at least 3 and no more than 6 terms of their first year of school, she did two terms of K and then was skipped into a yr 1/2 composite class the following year (when she should have done another year of K), due to a quirk of class composition all of her classmates had been 6 termers, so she was fully a year younger than the next youngest child and fully two years younger than half the class. It was the happiest I had seen her in a year.

Eighteen months into the skip I really wish I had let them place her into the yr2 section of that class, she wasn't ready for yr2 at the beginning of last year, but she's ready to be in yr3 now, not yr2... Arrrghh. So for us that WPPSI at 4.75 years was definitely a minimum. Though at the time, like you (seem to feel), we figured she was no more than "normally bright", she seemed perfectly normal to us. I have had one of the few friends I've spoken to about her journey say to me "She seems like a perfectly normal kid to me" (with absolute kindness of intent). She does seem perfectly normal... We used to joke she was HG at dress up and sandpit.

DS took the WPPSI when he was a young 5. The examiner did not do a good job of establishing trust, and DS was resistant from the very beginning. The scores were low, and they clearly do not correlate with DS's capabilities in the classroom (and elsewhere).

So I'm very skeptical of putting any stock in low scores. High scores probably are indicative of high native intelligence (as traditionally defined), unless the tests are gamed somehow, but low scores? I remain unconvinced they mean much.

Also, keep in mind the Flynn effect as a confounding factor for IQ testing across different tests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I just wanted to clarify this one thing in case it was mentioned in reference to the WJ-III I mentioned that my dd took (in my reply above) - there are "two" WJ-III tests - one is a set of Tests of Achievement, the other is the WJ-III Cognitive Abilities test, which is an ability test that will give you an IQ #. I was referring to the WJ-III Cognitive Abilities test in my reply. Although it doesn't seem to be as widely used, it is the ability test of choice in our school district (for gifted and for LD), and I've found it very useful for understanding my 2e kids' abilities.

pbear

Gladly. My dd4.9 is intense, creative, bright and exhausting. She is an only child and has had me at home with her since day 1. She started to grasp things quickly but to what extent I wasn't so sure. I thought it was cute that she could do things earlier than what Babycenter predicted but I wasn't convinced that she was gifted. Nevertheless, like I stated above. we had her tested "just in case" and she scored a FSIQ154 (with subtests high enough to comfortably hold on the blackjack table) which at the time didn't even register with me. I mean I knew she was bright but compared to Fred Tate, she didn't compare;) However, when I researched giftedness I started to appreciate the varying degrees of giftedness and how each SD away would potentially require that much more specialized planning.

As I was starting to make some sense of what we are dealing with it was also pretty evident that our local school would not be an option, and that sent us scurrying to the local G-privates trying to get her in before the spring deadlines. (Didn't like to make this decision so quickly, especially since we had to borrow from her college fund to pay for kindergarten(!).

This is where the research started to become faith. I know that in theory being surrounded by other gifted children, learning at a faster pace and with more depth would be ideal, but we're placing a large wager on her best perceived option. We've already enrolled her at the G-School and have made the commitment for year one, so I won't allow myself to second guess, but I will say that had the score come in around,125-130, we would have very likely went in another direction.

DD9 scored at a gifted-but-not-DYS level on the WPPSI at age 4, with no substantial subtest scatter. At age 8, she had substantially higher scores (DYS-level GAI) on the WISC, and also substantial scatter that earned her a dysgraphia diagnosis.

It's interesting that she didn't have nearly as much scatter on the WPPSI, which I think has to do with fewer fluency tests and pencil-and-paper work, so she wasn't challenged with the stuff that is difficult for her.

I think testing at age 4 is quite inaccurate, but in an asymmetrical way. There are plenty of things that could cause a highly intelligent 4 year old to bomb the test and have their true IQ drastically underestimated, but it's hard to see how IQ could be too drastically overestimated.

As to the "all kids will even out by third grade" axiom, it's propaganda and nonsense. Higher ability kids learn faster (if given the chance) and so achievement gaps increase with age.

I agree. This is like saying that "all girls start their periods at 12" or "all boys' voices change at 14." It's simply not possible to predict and generalize that way.

Take my DD10, for example... she was one of those early 3 year old readers who seemed to tank in public school... then in the "infamous third grade" seemed very average. Then in grade 4 she became obsessed with books, in grade 5 was in the gifted math stream, and now reads a novel a night (she was the first kid in her school to read all of their assigned reading challenge novels this year - grade 5). Grade 3? Meh. Now? Much more like herself.

I'm not saying that this is the case with the OP's child, but I do believe that IQ can come in "too high," so to speak and have seen the numbers drift down over time like polarbear mentions in some instances. The highest number ever achieved isn't necessarily the most accurate number forever.

In the instance of early numbers being higher than they later wind up, I've seen it happen in instances where the child is at least above average and in a very enriched environment. For instance, getting even one question wrong when you are at the upper age limit for a test will significantly diminish your scores (the ceilings we all hear about). The same is true on the other end: younger kids who get even a few "hard" questions right will wind up with their scores shooting way up. A kid who lives in an environment where s/he is exposed to a rich vocabulary, has opportunities to acquire knowledge (books are read to the child, science museums are visited, etc.), etc. is a child who may wind up with a higher score early on b/c his vocabulary and knowledge in relation to his age peers in the norming group may be better. This may or may not be due to factors that will impact the child's general intelligence in relation to peers as s/he and those peers continue to develop and age.

In regard to the OP's child, though, the best advice we got was to do what is right for your child *right now*. If right now, the school system is going to make your child unhappy or create an environment where she won't learn anything, doing something different is totally reasonable regardless of what her long term IQ scores may or may not be.

Cricket2, what you say sounds right. It would be interesting to see some studies of the variation of scores with age, and the causes of such variation.

My kids are early bloomers, so I've been keeping an eye on this. We have definitely known some kids who seemed bright but who were not doing nearly what DD was doing in K who have "bloomed" as the children have aged. So, I do see some evening out--though it is worth saying that what I see now is a bunch of kids who seemed bright but there wasn't really concrete evidence for it now showing concrete proof, but some kids are still ahead. One thing that might muddle things and lead to this observation is that at a certain age, kids don't want to read much past their maturity level. This has been discussed here--what 9yo really wants to read for pleasuure at 1200 Lexile? So bright kids and HG+ kids may all be reading Harry Potter in 2nd or 3rd grade.

I don't know of any children who read at 3 and then evened out. But I don't hang with pushy parents.

I'd probably agree with that comment about kids reading at three. There is only so much that one can hothouse a kid into doing. I definitely saw kids who were the better readers in grade at age 5-7 who aren't gifted, but kids who read unusually early like at three (and I mean really read not just able to sound out cvc words with a lot of parental instruction), probably are going to turn out gifted or close.

I may have the weird kid, but your comment about younger kids not wanting to read beyond their maturity level did give me a smile b/c my dd14 developed an interest in WWII at age 8 and wanted an explanation for how people could have allowed the concentration camps to happen. She read Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority shortly after her eighth bd as a result. I remember that one being assigned reading in a college sociology course I took.

A 6-year-old may not read much beyond his or her maturity level either, but in the case of my DS, it's less about Lexile scores than it is about subject matter! Most of the kidfic that's written at his comfortable decoding level is aimed at mid-grades, and he just doesn't relate to stories that require him to understand "older" social situations and emotional concerns. He's even a bit young for Harry Potter right now. (Give him another year!)

Non-fiction, on the other hand... that's a different story. He'll read all kinds of stuff about science, math, other cultures, food (current fave is "Cooking for Geeks"), whatever. I'm glad he hasn't asked sticky questions about ethics and evil yet. Milgram? Whoa!

Asynchronous development in these kids is so hard to manage. I'm just glad we live in an age when we have a ridiculously large supply of books and online reading material -- even though I'm heavily editing his reading lists, he'll never be bored.

Lots of good comments. I would say that if you look at my DS's subsequent achievement test scores, and how things have panned out in terms of needing a grade skip and accelerated classes, that the SB-V my DS took at age 4 was accurate. More accurate were the predictions and comments that the tester made in her report.

If you haven't already, I would recommend checking out Ruf's "5 Levels of Gifted". It has its drawbacks in that it was a small sample size and much of the information was anecdotal, but it was helpful to me to see all the information about what HG kids were doing when they were young.

My belief is that the very early readers who get high scores on early IQ tests has something to do with figuring out the whole decoding thing, which is useful across the board and tends not to go away so much. But this is just my opinion.

And to quote Dottie, the best way to tell where your kid falls on the GT spectrum is many scores over time. You need more data to see a trend. And who knows what it all means in the future. As polarbear (I think) said, try to address your child's particular needs as they come up. They may change quite a bit, and more quickly than you would like, but if you remain flexible, things will be as good as they can be. There is usually no perfect situation for HG kids, but by knowing your own kid and how he/she learns, you will be in a better position to know what type of educational setting will work.

ds took the wppsi at 4. his score is almost identical to his wisc he took this year at 7. he was reading at about a 1st grade level when he tested at 4...and at about a 5th grade level when he tested this year(he's in 3rd). he did not "even out". he also grade skipped, still has to have pull out/push in services, and is subject accelerated an additional year in math.

Bump

My early-reader, now third-grader did NOT even out. She has a current lexile level of 1100-1260. She also did not "burn out" from her early reading and she LOVES to read.

Oh dear, those might just be the very words I'd use to describe DD8...then and now. Hold on to your hat!

We weren't testing DS for giftedness but were investigating delays. So at 3.5 his score was 106 and at 6 on the WISC it was 126, with his non-verbal score being 141. I think his non-verbal score was around 118 when he was tested at age 3. At age 6, he had the test after taking about 5 other tests on the same day, so I don't know how accurate it was--it might be an underestimate. I have to say that when he was tested at 3 he wasn't particularly cooperative so who knows what his score would have been back then if he had tried harder. It's incredibly hard to test preschoolers. Some are very shy and others are hyper. If a preschool child is extremely calm and cooperative during testing, their score might actually be an overestimate because that child is being compared to all the very intelligent kids who score poorly because they are shy or hyper and don't test well, but are actually brighter.

I think there is research saying that scores can fluctuate a lot until a child is 8 or 9 because of poor test reliability with young children and also differences in brain maturation. Check out the book "Nurture Shock"--there is a chapter in there on giftedness and IQ testing. If a child tests at the extreme high end, they are probably not going to fall down into the "not gifted" range, though. Kids develop at different rates so an early-bloomer is not necessarily gifted and vice versa. My kid was delayed with just about everything and now his GAI is above the 99th percentile, meaning he has surpassed many of the kids who appeared brighter at age 2.

Here is a brief summary of "nurture shock"
http://nurtureshockmoment.blogspot.com/

Interesting but not many people here claim that IQ is an indicator of academic success. In fact most of us know of cases where gifted children did very poorly academically. WPPSI isn't a test for academic success it is a test for academic potential.

If you read the book I think it goes into more detail about a low correlation between IQ scores in preschool and IQ scores later on. It's not just about academic success. I believe the book, as that has been my personal experience with one of my kids. Even if DS had been cooperating nicely on the test in preschool, I seriously doubt that his score would have been anywhere near what it was 2 years later. At 6, I can still see a lot of development in areas like speech/language so it wouldn't surprise me if his verbal IQ goes up in the future and the huge gap that currently exists starts to close. He has a 27 point gap between verbal and non-verbal, currently.

Here's another article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25bigcity.html?_r=0

Here's a comment that someone wrote in response to an article--I found it interesting:

"*I administer some of these tests*

One thing research is showing us (and, anecdotally, I've seen in kids I've worked with) is that very young children who've had "many advantages" test high on the verbal portions of tests and on the crystallized intelligence parts (most closely related to general knowledge). On tests where these areas are give heavy weighting (or tests that look at these areas only) these children test as gifted. On tests that are made of other sup groupings (such as a performance scale, visual spatial skills, etc) the scores are more in line with *actual* ability (because no amount of enrichment can raise these skills much). So a child may have an over all GIA that looks to be in the superior range, but on close analysis the subtest scores suggest enhanced verbal ability pulling the GIA from average / above average into that superior range. At the moment we report these kids as "gifted in verbal ability" and expect to see them settle somewhere closer to the mean over time.

My personal working theory is if they can't muster a superior or very high average score in the tests that relate to inductive and deductive logic and fluid reasoning type tasks (that can't be substantially improved with teaching/enrichment) then the case for giftedness is questionable."

An IQ score is an indicator of academic success, as much research has shown -- it is just not a perfect one.

And there are academics and there is school...and in today's age there is a big difference in academic success and school success.

I have a son that really wants to be an writer but he probably will not have success on the school system's NCLB writing test (given 4th, 8th and 10th grades). Awesome potential as a writer, not very good chance at even passing answering a stupid prompt in 1 hour and meeting their criteria (although he can do every step of the task individually). Just the way it is.

He will take the 8th grade test this year. If he doesn't pass it, I don't think there is a problem (he gets nearly straight As and will do nearly perfect or perfect on the math, EOC Algebra test, and reading portion of the test and so they will just place him in 9th grade). And he can write well thought out paragraphs and essays with correct grammar, usage and mechanics. He just doesn't do well on the writing test.

If he can't pass 10th grade writing test (with the option to retake it several times) they won't let him graduate. He might end up homeschooling 11th and 12th grades.

My thought on the "they all even out by the third grade" is that if I put my EG/PG kid into the regular curriculum, and he wasn't challenged anymore, that yes, by third grade others would catch up.

But, I'm in the middle of it now, so I'm biased.

I am facing a bit of a problem. My DD used a well-known and respected school psychologist in the Chicagoland area who has been dropped by my child's school admissions department due to inconsistencies in her test results.
I don't fault the school at all for this. However, it puts our family in a bind concerning the future direction of her education.
I suppose having her re-tested is the next logical step, but I am wondering if anybody has ever been through this scenario. (Backstory: I started this thread btw because I felt as though this development was a possibility)

Huckleberry, I told you about my dd's experience in my original reply to this post - she had a high WPPSI, was retested and had significantly lower scores across the board on the WISC. The thing that was similar on both tests was that her subtest scores were very consistent (with the exception of two that were relatively low due to vision issues). I didn't mention it before, but will mention it now that the psych who tested her was also frequently used by parents wanting to get into our school district's gifted program, and was not considered to be a reliable psych for gifted testing (there were concerns among school district staff that scores from some psychs were inflated specifically to help kids get into the program, and those scores didn't hold up over the years, and the kids who came in to the program with scores from those psychs sometimes did not succeed and had to be asked to leave. We weren't at the psych for gifted testing - we'd pursued the psych appointment because our dd was having severe anxiety, and the high WPSSI scores at 5 were a surprise to us. The later scores held up much more in line with where we think is our dd's true ability level.

That said, our dd has been extremely successful in school. She's in an academically rigorous program, is an extremely conscientious student, gets straight As, and is very motivated to do well in school. She doesn't have DYS (or even highly gifted) ability scores, and I doubt she'll score as high on the SAT as a highly gifted student will - but she has a lot of options for advanced work in secondary school simply because she is an engaged and successful student and I suspect if she keeps doing well she'll have a great selection of college programs to choose from too. I am not convinced at all that if she had continued to score sky-high on ability tests that she'd be in any essentially different position academically. While she is not in need of the uber-acceleration and intellectual stimulation that her EG brother craves, she's still an incredibly successful, happy student. So I would be careful not to put a filter on what you think a child is capable of accomplishing simply based on whether or not they have a gifted IQ.

Best wishes,

polarbear

This isn't what I think the "even out by third grade" is intended to mean. I can also tell you, that having an EG child in the position of never having accelerated programming available in early elementary - other kids didn't "catch up and he never "evened out" - he was clearly ahead of his class in ability in kindergarten and still there in 3rd grade and on. The "even out" that took place was that kids who started reading early vs late etc - "evened out" as in fell into where their abilities were going to place them by 3rd grade - just because a student wasn't reading at 5, for instance, meant that they wouldn't be reading ahead of grade level once they were reading, and just because a child was reading at 4 didn't mean they were destined to be reading above grade level in 3rd. The "even out" as I've understood it from teachers simply refers to a wide range of *when* students learn to read - both based on when they are developmentally ready and in some cases exposure.

polarbear

Huckleberry - PM'd you...

Since this popped up and I have an answer, here's our experience... DD took the WPPSI shortly after 4.5 and her FSIQ score was 137. There was a lot of variation in a few of the subtests, which the tester couldn't explain; in hind sight, perhaps related to her ADHD or vision issues which were not well treated at the time. At the time the tester stated in the report that DD would likely test higher in the future.

She took the WISC-IV recently at 8. Her subtest scores were fairly even across the board and her FSIQ went up nearly 20 points. She's also taken the CogAT and WIAT-III within the same month, and the school psych gave her the RIAS last fall, and the results all suggest that her recent WISC scores are fair measures. Since the original test, she's also gotten medication and therapy for ADHD.

Oh, and FWIW, suffering through nearly 3 years of public school has not evened her achievement levels out with the rest of the class. Though I can see how this situation could, with a child with a different personality or more non-academic interests or better social awareness than DD.

Bump. We just did the WPPSI-IV for DS 3:5. Just curious if other folks who did early testing a few years ago have feedback about how it panned out.

An IQ score contains signal and noise, and the noise is on average positive for the high scorers. Therefore some regression to the mean is to be expected. Is there research on how much?

SAT score reports indicate how the scores are likely to change upon retaking. A math SAT score of 770 falls on average to 745 upon retaking, but scores in the 500s on reading and writing change little upon retaking. So high scores mean-revert, but this phenomenon has little effect on middling scores.

Re: noise. Do you mean SEM, reliability, longitudinal studies, and the like? If so, yes. The first two are in the manuals. I know there's been some research on the second. Check out the Lothian birth cohort. Try googling "IQ regression to the mean" for some amusing (?) discussions on that topic from a statistical perspective.

Doing a quick survey, I did find that it appears available evidence suggests that high scores not only revert, they revert more than sub-mean scores (3-5 point on re-administration if IQ above 109, vs 1-2 if below 90, in a study where children were re-tested three years apart).

For us, we found that the original test might have been a bit high in terms of a number score. How has it been going? (PM'd you as well)

DS was tested at 3.6 for early entrance to a gifted pre-k. He scored in the HG
Range with PRI significantly higher than VCI on the WPPSI. The tester said
To test again at six because she was sure his VCI was an underestimate of his abilities. At six he got scores that got him into DYS. His verbal score was the highest this time.

I found this article on regression to the mean interesting. I may have read about it on here, so I apologize if it is repetitive. It also makes me wonder why all gifted programs don't test for both achievement and ability.

https://faculty.education.uiowa.edu/docs/dlohman/Gifted_Today.pdf

Socially, she's adjusting to the climate. Some good days, some days not so much.
Academically, she's doing "fine". She keeps up with her peers, but doesn't approach the curriculum as I had thought she would have. In her spare time, she would rather play at a park, or play pretend or play dolls. You know, NT stuff. There is a mild interest towards some things but at home she just wants to play.
Qwestion: I PM'd you back (we don't have that around us)
Appleton- I think g programs do take into to account achievement and ability. But to the degree they value output versus problem solving depends on the school.
Thanks for the article,