I am also not an expert, but here are my thoughts...

Originally Posted by Lupine
I suspect the scores of parts of the test that required pencil and paper work are depressed because she has fine motor control issues. Not truly awful but noticeably below that of her peers.


There are two subtests that require pencil and paper (Coding and Symbol Search) and both are within the PSI. Coding requires the greatest fine motor skills. The Block Design subtest (within the PRI) also requires some fine motor skills to manipulate the blocks. Since Block Design is only one of three subtests within the PRI, fine motor issues shouldn't have a 'huge' impact on the PRI composite score. There are only two subtests that go into the PSI, so fine motor skills can have a dramatic impact here.

Do you have the scaled scores for each of the 10 subtests? If not, you may want to request them. The scatter within the subtests can be as useful as the scatter between the four indexes when trying to figure out what is going on. For instance, is Block Design the lowest PRI score? And is the Coding score much lower than Symbol Search?

Originally Posted by Lupine
The school offered no ideas as to why they thought there was such a large scatter between her VCI and PRI scores other than some tepid "maybe she was getting bored" throwaways.
I assume this comment was given by people who didn't administer the test? As I understand it, the subtests are intermixed when they are administered. That is, the Block Design subtest (from PRI) is given first, followed by Similarities (from VCI) followed by Digit Span (from WMI), followed by Picture Concepts (from VCI), etc. So getting bored shouldn't have an impact on just one of the four indexes. The tester should have provided notes about the test behavior if he or she saw any indication that the scores may not be a good representation of the child.

If you don't feel like your questions are being answered by the school and the tester, there are psychologists with experience in gifted and 2E that will re-interpret the scores for you. Another reason to try to get the subtest scores if you don't have them already.

Pi22