I'm not a big advocate of the IOWA scale. The IOWA scale tests knowledge; in many cases it has material that your child would only know through experiential learning, not intuitively. It is not capability-based testing. I really don't find it useful for the purpose it was intended. In our case, the IOWA scale was administered, but not by a qualified person, and this person was dead set against accelerating my son. We were able to convince another school to accelerate him one year, and it made a world of difference. He was much happier. There were a few speed bumps in that his handwriting was a atrocious, and he had to deal with a few areas where he missed some of the steps in math/English, but he caught up very, very quickly on those things. Just because a child is gifted doesn't mean he can gloss over certain topics and never have to learn them at all. For example, my son was able to do advanced math but was horrible at basic math concepts...sounds strange, but true. I think he did much better socially as well. He's now 15 and very well-adjusted. Much more mature emotionally and socially than his peers, but one grade skip was better than nothing at all...
I think you are mixing up the ITBS (Iowa test of Basic Skills given for various grade levels) with the Iowa Scale used in Gifted education meetings as a means of gathering all sorts of various data into a form (scale) to determine if someone is a good candidate for a skip or subject acceleration. It has all sorts of data points from achievement testing to questions such as does the child want to skip or is there a sibling in the next grade up. They are different things totally.
