I'm sorry this is a long post, I'm freaking out a little.
I've been at a loss with what to do with DD, going into 5th grade this year, so at the last minute I took her in for the school district testing for the gifted program. The test just came back, and she scored in the 98th on the verbal and 39 on the nonverbal and didnt qualify. I'm not sure what to make of this. I know I'm not a crazy person who thinks their kid is smarter than she is! I was in a gifted program in elementary school (and my husband has a much higher IQ than I do) and there is no question DD has at the very least a much faster processing speed and a better memory than I do. I wouldn't care about the testing except that the whole reason we did it is because she just finished a rough year in school, and I've been trying to figure out how to help her, and I think she's being underestimated and needs to be challenged. I'm wondering if these scores could explain why she's struggling in school and what kind of testing would be helpful to pursue privately. She has always scored in the 98-99 percentile in all of the standardized testing in school for math, reading, spelling, etc. but this year in spite of her high test scores she constantly had missing work, skipped problems on assignments, etc.
At first I thought the score might be wrong because after the test DD kept talking about how the best part was the patterns, that she had fun figuring them all out, and she was really sure she answered all of them exactly right. I'm not even sure if they're scored as "right" or "wrong," and I'm just guessing that is the section she's referring to. But then I read the description on the Cogat site and it said that the test doesn't measure IQ, it measures academic skills. So now I'm wondering if maybe the score is accurate and she didn't follow the instructions.
The last consideration for placement is a writing assessment. Her score wasn't qualifying, but this is the one score that doesn't surprise me at all. After the test she told me the grade ahead her was assigned time travel, and she had this awesome, unique idea with really hilarious supporting points that she outlined for me in the car. Her own grade was assigned a topic on pets, and she told me she finished it really fast because she just read a bunch of books on the kind of dog she wanted a couple of weeks before, so she spent the rest of the time working on what she would write if she had been assigned the other topic. I've seen what she writes when she wants to finish quickly compared to her writing when she cares about something and I wish she could have taken the other topic! But I understand what they are measuring is partly the discipline to write well regardless of the topic.
I'm ready to pay out of pocket for private testing, but I can't afford to pay for an assessment that doesn't give us good information I can use to figure out what to do next. I want to go in knowing what to ask for, or at least what to expect if this isn't reasonable.
DD also has ADHD, as do I. DH was diagnosed with ADHD because I pushed him into testing, but after reading recently about the misdiagnosis of high IQ, I'm not so sure. Sometimes I also second guess this diagnosis with DD, but then I remember something that happened in kindergarten. DD didn't go to preschool because of our family situation at the time. I worked with her at home and we did "fun preschool." I tried to teach her to read using the method that was really successful with DS. I just couldn't get her to sit still and focus on the material at all. It felt like she was "drawing" the letters, not learning them. I still went through the motions for a while, but I basically gave up, thinking she would learn better in school. In kindergarten there were reminders in the newsletters to practice sight words because the kids were supposed to pass them off by Thanksgiving. I was so frustrated because whenever I tried the flash cards with her she would just guess and barely even look at the card. When I went into PTC, I asked the teacher for suggestions, and she was surprised- she told me DD passed them all off during the first screening at the beginning of the school year. And she was reading in school, even though I hadn't ever seen her read independently before. I have always believed that she knew how to read and just wasn't interested and she struggled to focus. In the school setting, a little older and with an amazingly structured kindergarten teacher, DD was a fantastic reader.
My point is that I have no idea what kind of impact ADHD has on school and testing. I thought we were managing it pretty well, but I second guess this a lot. Especially when she tells me stuff like, "I have two desks now! The teacher gave me the extra desk so I can have one for my work and one for all of my books and stuff." I checked in with the teacher often and everything has always been reported as okay- DD is disorganized but doing great.
But she is not really "doing great." Maybe some of it is hormones, but she was getting in the car frustrated with school way too often.
Tell me what to do!
