Originally Posted by Pi22
Originally Posted by MumOfThree
Pi22, as a parent of a child who has had it NOT calculated that was a really really good thing for us, when you have a 3-4 deviation spread between indexes the FSIQ is meaningless but educators WILL look at if it's there and many will not think any further, no matter how many notes the psychologist makes about it's meaningless nature.
MumOfThree, I think you have an excellent point that educators may not be able to look past the FSIQ. It is a shame that educators aren't better trained in understanding the results. My own DS has a 60 point spread (4 standard deviations) between index scores so I do understand the importance of the four indexes, but I also wanted to know his FSIQ since working memory and processing speed are still aspects of general intelligence. So I wouldn't say the FSIQ was meaningless to us.

I'm not a professional, just the parent of a 2e student with a significant spread in scores due to lower processing speed and somewhat lower working memory. Our neuropsych did calculate FSIQ for our ds in spite of the large gap, but fwiw, I don't see how it is helpful at all in understanding our ds. While processing speed and working memory are components of what is considered to be "general intelligence", having the FSIQ doesn't help understand our child's learning strengths or challenges - it's simply a somewhat-averaged calculation between widely varying scores that represent different areas of abilities. What was useful to me as a parent in understanding my ds' abilities was having all the subscores and the composite scores for various categories such as VCI etc. What was useful in advocating at school was his GAI and achievement testing.

Best wishes,

polarbear