Hi All,
I've been reading here for a while, but testing issues pretty much still confound me. My basic question here is what tests to request for my second grade daughter.
Here is our situation. My older PG daughter had such a bad experience in the public school that we have pulled her out, a decision we have no second thoughts about. In the process, I got to know the school psychologist a bit. It seemed pretty clear to me that she is smart but a servant to the school's interests and not to the children's, and that she takes shortcuts that are not necessarily helpful to families. In particular, she failed to offer us anything in writing the first time she tested my child several years ago, pulled my older child for an IQ test in the middle of a meltdown the second time, provided percentile results without numerical scores or indications of which tests she used (until I asked), and saw only my daughter's emotional problems and not the significance of her intellectuals giftedness in contributing to her school difficulties.
Now here we are in need of help with our younger daughter, whose gifts are quite different from her sister and has not been tested yet. She continues to attend the public school. Our younger daughter's strongest area is art, and she inclines toward math. She is introverted and quiet, and generally is cooperative in school. But she has shut down with homework this year in a way that is worrying us. My husband and I both wonder if the homework strike is not her own way of expressing the "rage of the gifted child." We would like not make the mistakes we made with our older daughter, letting her emotional problems go for such a long time.
So we think it is time to ask the school psychologist to administer an IQ test. But because I do not trust the psychologist completely, I would like to give her some instructions. Left to her own devices, I think that she will probably just do a general test that will not capture my daughter's strengths in the visual realm--her goal will be to see whether she qualifies for the (nonexistent) GT program or not, not to provide a total look at my child.
What tests should we ask her to administer? What should I ask her to put in writing.
