One thing I'd do is ask your ped for a recommendation and also ask any other parents you know who may have also advocated through your school district. If possible, see if you can get a sense of which psychs your school district finds credible - ime, that can be every bit as important as experience testing gifted kids. We were told by our school district that they do not trust assessments by some psychs who are known (here where I live) to inflate scores to help get young children into our public school gifted program. I'd also consider testing through the school district if you haven't - that can be a good first step, it's free, and the school district staff will trust the results.
To be honest, our ds' IQ tests in and of themselves were not terribly useful when advocating at school - they were good info for us as parents to have (to know that we weren't nuts re what we thought his IQ was)... but at school they had limited utility in advocating. What worked better was achievement testing, and using the IQ as an additional data point. (Caveat - there are IQ cut-offs for gifted programs here, and we have used his private testing for part of his admissions applications for that - but private ability testing alone wasn't enough, using achievement testing, and the schools *really* preferred achievement testing and preferred achievement testing through the schools.
It's a tough call to make if you have both options (private vs school testing) - but in general, I've found private testing has given me more thorough and reliable information, but school testing is more readily accepted by the schools.
Best wishes,
polarbear
Last edited by polarbear; 06/11/14 12:15 PM.
