Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WISC results not as expected

I did not read all the responses, but it seems to me that if vision did have an effect on test scores, it would affect the tests like block design and matrix reasoning the most.

DS took the WISC after a brain injury palsied the sixth cranial nerve, meaning one eye was stuck and could not move at all for months. He went to school with a patch on his normal eye, so that he would not lose his vision and he was able to read with an eye that did not track (this was kindergarten). When he was not patched, he had severe double vision at all times, but he was still able to read fluently, he just closed one eye or looked at one of the two books that he saw and ignored the other one (sounds weird I know, but that's what he said. That there were two books side-by-side and he just focused on one of them). I took him in for neuropsych testing when his eye was still not fully normal (it gradually regained tracking ability to the outside--a tiny bit each day, and the two images moved closer together each day), and he did fine on all the tests involving vision. I'm not trying to say that I don't think it's possible that a child could be affected by vision issues, but with DS, it seemed to affect him very little in terms of how he was able to function. He would run up/down steps just like before, even with no depth perception and he must have been seeing two sets of steps. Kids have amazing resilience. Sounds like in your DD's case she is far-sighted (????) but if she is able to read fluently, it's probably not bad enough that it would have affected test results that much.
That all being said, DS had the same gap on the WISC w/ verbal being lower. I think it was 114 and PRI was 141. Coding was his lowest score (a 10). He DOES have a disability--he has dyspraxia/devepmental coordination disorder. So he is slow with motor skills and that caused somewhat lower scores with the tests that involved motor skills and were timed, like coding and block design (block design was I think a 13, where the other PRI tests were 18-19). In terms of verbal skills, he had delayed speech, which is common with dyspraxia,and at age 6 when he was tested, that could have still been playing a role. I think that he continues to improve with time and the VCI probably was not a truly accurate representaion of his long-term ability. His reading comprehension scores (which test above-level), are 99th+ percentile, which doesn't go along with a 114 VCI. I think it's possible that DS also said "I don't know" to any of the questions that he didn't feel like answering. He does that with me all the time. The person testing doesn't necessarily know if the kid really doesn't know, or if they are just saying that.

I have heard of autism spectrum disorder causing significant gaps (either a much higher verbal or much higher non-verbal), but it doesn't seem like there would be any reason to suspect that in your DD. I did some research trying to figure out what this gap meant, and most of what I found involved PRI being lower. DS's neuropsych called it a "relative weakness" but didn't think it meant anything. He seemed more concerned about DS's processing speed score, which was around 110, saying that the gap between that and his PRI score would cause frustration later (where he understands very advanced concepts but the speed is not there).

If you need a test score for a gifted program (not sure why you were testing?) you may want to consider having a different test, like the Stanford Binet, just to make sure you're not missing something.