DD#2 - now age 11.5 - was in a lockstep, low-level-stated-mandated-test-prep-oriented not-at-all-accelerated-or-differentiated public school through the first half of 3rd grade. Second half of 3rd grade, we transferred her to a school for "gifted and superior [top 10% on something]" kids, which is a start-up and kind of disorganized (no clear curriculum path, no vertical alignment of curriculum), but the kids are overall fairly bright, and they do read and write and stuff instead of just prepping for low-level standardized tests the way the public school did. DD#2 was not grade or subject-accelerated (never ever allowed in our system), though we did do lots of playful acceleration things at home, and read tons and tons.

DD#2 reads voraciously for pleasure at home, mostly fiction, but sometimes science too. She now loves to write fiction and plays as well, though she was turned off of writing for a while in 3rd grade, when a very bad gifted-pull-out teacher taught them writing and insisted on quantity over detail and depth.

Developmental milestones for both of our daughters are consistent with "exceptionally" gifted profile / possible Ruf 5. DD#2 started speaking meaningfully and with complexity early. Very interested in books and stories very young. But reading didn't take off very early with her the way it did with our older EG DD#1. DD#2 preferred to be read to, and before kindergarten (age 5.5) was really just reading Dr. Seuss books herself. During full-day kindergarten (plus long bus ride), she was tired after school, and would read to herself some - Dr. Seuss books or the easy Little House books (not the real ones). But she seemed to get tired out very quickly. Reading began to take off summer after kindergarten, with the sudden realization on everyone's part that she could easily read a full Magic Treehouse book, wait! several full Magic Treehouse books! in a row. Then another big jump the summer after 1st grade (age 7.5) when she read Harry Potter books 1-5. By the beginning of second grade, she was testing at 6th grade on Accelerated Reader computer-adaptive STAR test, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test. On another school computer-adaptive test at the beginning of 3rd grade, she tested overall at almost the 8th grade reading level, with scores at 10th grade for short passages, and lower scores for long passages, higher scores for fiction, and lower scores for non-fiction.

When she was 10.5, we had her tested by psychologist specializing in gifted kids with WISC-IV and WJ-III.

Results for WISC-IV Age 10:

Verbal Comprehension (VCI)
COMPOSITE SCORE 155
PERCENTILE RANK >99.9

Perceptual Reasoning (PRI)
COMPOSITE SCORE 129
PERCENTILE RANK 97

Working Memory (WMI)
COMPOSITE SCORE 132
PERCENTILE RANK 98

Processing Speed (PSI)
COMPOSITE SCORE 94
PERCENTILE RANK 34

Full Scale (FSIQ)
138
PERCENTILE RANK 99

General Ability Index (GAI)
151
PERCENTILE RANK >99.9

WJ-III Age 10

Total Achievement
SS 140
PERCENTILE RANK 99.6
GE 12.6

Broad Reading
SS 128
PERCENTILE RANK 97
GE 10.2

Broad Math
SS 142
PERCENTILE RANK 99
GE 13.0

Broad Written Language
SS 134
PERCENTILE RANK 99
GE 13.0

Academic Skills
SS 142
PERCENTILE RANK 99.7
GE 13.0

Academic Fluency
SS 122
PERCENTILE RANK 92
GE 8.3

Academic Applications
SS 135
PERCENTILE RANK 99
GE 13.0

DD#2 ceilinged out on all 6 of the GAI subtests (did not meet discontinue criterion on any of them); actually, same for all of the GAI supplemental subtests, with exception of Information.

Psychologist noted big difference between other indices and the PSI. Said there were no mistakes on any of the PSI subtests, but speed was slow. She also gave DD#2 the supplemental Cancellation test (not included in the reported PSI), and that score was even LOWER - at 16th percentile for random Cancellation and at 5th percentile for structured Cancellation. The Cancellation tests were the last tests given in a couple hours of testing that first day (the psychologist did give breaks, but DD does tend to tire, and she is slightly anxious about performance, and had been nervous about doing the testing, so even though I think she eventually relaxed with the very nice psychologist, I am sure it was stressful for her, and she hadn't slept very well, had mild stomach ache at the beginning). Also, Block Design scaled score was 14 - no errors - she solved all the puzzles but got no bonus points for speed, and she solved the hardest one out of the time limit so got no credit for that one. So clearly lack of speed suppressed PRI.

Psychologist also noted possible effect of "low processing speed" on the writing and math WJ-III fluency tests - overall Academic Fluency was 122 while Total Achievement was 140.

Finally, psychologist noted relatively low WJ-III reading scores. Reading Comprehension score was 123, with several errors. Reading Fluency was around the same, with her making several errors and skipping one sentence.

So what does all this mean? ... Many possibilities....

DD#2 does not act in that dreamy way that classic ADD / primarily inattentive kids do. She speaks very quickly. She does have some performance anxiety, and her natural "set point" is to try not to make errors; although, if she has experience with the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy - e.g., playing a video game over and over - I think she is able to adjust by speeding up even at the cost of some errors, if that increases the overall score (i.e., she's not stubbornly obsessively perfectionistic, just cautious by default). She has sometimes gone too slowly on homework, particularly when she is anxious about teacher's response, when it is writing (she has "too many ideas" and has trouble getting them all down in a coherent way, she feels), and/or when she is tired after a long day. Example: Difficulty in 3rd grade "writing a story using vocabulary words" as homework after a long day, because she thinks the story should make sense and have a good story arc (and that would be hard to do for an adult to do quickly too!). I had to repeatedly reassure her that it's okay for the story to be silly at times to incorporate all of the vocabulary words, and still get the story done in 15 minutes. My older daughter (diagnosed with ADHD) acted the same way, except she didn't have anxiety - she also took forever to write stories because the stories in her head were LONG and COMPLICATED, yet she had a PSI in the 120s.

We have seen less of this problem - melt-downs with homework and having to be talked down - as she has adjusted to the new school over the last 2.5 years.

As a result of all of this, I am not necessarily convinced that the low PSI for DD#2 means anything other than that she is naturally cautious. It COULD mean something else, but I am not convinced that it does.

The reading comprehension and reading fluency scores are interesting. As I said, DD#2 reads voraciously for pleasure (6 or more hours during the summer), and she appears to read very, very fast. (Much faster than I or my husband read - I don't consider myself a super fast reader, but I read fast enough to get a perfect score on the LSAT, so watching my 9-10-year-old read 50% to 100% faster than me is an eerie experience.) One of the psychologist's suggestions was maybe that because she reads fiction for pleasure so much, and since her school emphasizes critical thinking, she may have developed a habit of not worrying too much about picky little details.

In general, the psychologist noted "processing speed's" effect on different scores. She suggested that DD#2 may have a visual processing problem (we had had an earlier 30-minute OT screen that suggested mild visual tracking problem and mild problem catching a ball - never followed up).

So I have a very general question. How surprising is it that a kid with a 155+ VCI would have a WJ-III Comprehension score of 123, or a WJ-III Broad Reading score of 128? She spent K-first half of 3rd grade in a school environment that didn't challenge her at all (in any way). Her new school is more engaging and I believe she is learning much more over all, but they don't do worksheets where the focus on making sure that they don't miss little details (and the curriculum is a little scattershot too - sometimes they read books and then end up never discussing them, due to lack of time - new school, new teachers, etc. - which means that if she is missing details in reading by reading too fast for "big picture" stuff, she might not ever find out). I know I've read that it's not unusual for achievement scores to be below IQ scores where the kid has not had much opportunity for acceleration or enrichment, and she has not had that IN SCHOOL. I do realize that that's a pretty big gap....

The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out whether there is some other "issue" - beyond her just being cautious the only time she had a chance to take the 3 subtests for PSI, and her having a habit of maybe NOT reading carefully on timed or untimed tests where details will turn out to matter much more than the "big picture". A year after the psychologist's testing, I have finally gotten her an appointment with a developmental optometrist. We had the first of two scheduled appointments earlier this week, and she apparently is far-sighted: +1.5 in one eye, and +1.25 in another. At first I thought "ah ha - we have missed that - maybe that's IT [cause of all problems and test discrepancies]!!!" (she'd only had vision screens with pediatrician each year, and these were normal). But when I started researching, it seemed like far-sightedness in kids isn't that unusual, this amount of far-sightedness is very mild, and kids can usually "accommodate" for it. I guess we'll know more at later appointments, either from more testing or from more explanation by optometrist. But I'm already wondering about this. I'm pretty sure the optometrist wants her to get glasses to correct that far-sightedness, and she's going to try to see if "prisms" will help or not. She also said that DD#2 has something like tight resting eye muscle state (NOT her exact wording, just my understanding), which comes from reading a lot as a young child (and maybe because of the far-sightedness?) and which could be very tiring, and that vision therapy might or might not turn out to be useful for that or necessary for that. At the next appointment, the optometrist will screen for more stuff, like the visual tracking and I don't know what else.

I do realize that some of this developmental optometry stuff is controversial. I really wish it had turned out that she was very far-sighted, and then we could give glasses a try and see if that helped significantly. But with such low amounts of far-sightedness, I do wonder if glasses will even make any difference, and I am not eager to engage in expensive, VERY troublesome (for us and for DD#2 who is already in school 7 hours a day plus bus rides in both directions), and controversial visual therapy, etc., all based on a processing speed score that could be explicable in other ways, reading and writing achievement scores that could be explicable in other ways, and other symptoms (like fatigue, dislike of writing in 3rd grade) that come and go and could be explicable in other ways.

So I'm wondering about thoughts on these WISC-IV and WJ-III results in relation to possibly related IRL things and in relation to vision issues in particular.

Oh, one more thing: When questioned specifically, she says that she reads something like paragraphs all at one time, and ALWAYS reads at least full lines at one time - she does not perceive herself as moving her eyes as she reads across a line. Obviously, she could be wrong, but I thought it's interesting that she thinks that.

Last edited by LaurieBeth; 06/20/16 03:43 PM. Reason: delete name