From personal experience… the school is going to have firm guidelines for what they identify as gifted. They are going to test to see if your kid meets the identification guidelines. They aren’t really going to test for better understanding of your child’s profile. Their goal is to screen the whole population of students to find the gifted ones.
My son was all over the place when he was five and six years old. He would sometimes cooperate with assessments and other times not. I knew he had high ability, but I also knew that he wasn’t going to consistently show that ability.
Our school screens for gifted at second grade. The first screener didn’t identify him., One classroom teacher told me to ask about retesting. The gifted coordinator retested using a different assessment that did identify him. As he got older, they started using achievement tests that are adaptive. Once he started doing adaptive testing, he started looking way more gifted. Also, just reaching out and connecting with your gifted coordinator may be helpful.
If you want really good information, I would encourage you to get comprehensive testing privately. And definitely find someone who specializes in gifted. We came with very specific questions based on behaviors at school and feedback from teachers along with what we knew about our kid as parents. Once you have a private assessment, you can bring the report back to the school.
Since your child is pretty young, I would probably start looking for a psychologist that specializes in gifted. I would reach out to them and see what it takes to have your kid assessed. And at what age they think it would be most useful. You don’t really have to act on this just yet. But there might be a point when you want to use it: to place him appropriately at school or get supports, accommodations, enrichment, or advancement in place.
As my son has gotten older, we have gotten more testing and he has a learning, disability in writing, and some executive functioning deficits. I wouldn’t know any of this stuff if I didn’t get him privately tested. The school really is not set up to screen for kids with that kind of complexity. Even once we took that information back to the school, the school doesn’t identify the disability because it doesn’t meet their criteria for an IEP. But he does have 504 accommodations, and a team of people from the school are pretty well informed about his profile. I have also found that the school is not super knowledgeable about the ins and outs of gifted kids especially twice exceptional kids. I’ve had to go out to read and find experts then bring back information to the school.
I will say that the gifted coordinator has been very helpful for us. She is the one person in the school that understands the complexity and how to address it and also knows the school system and what the teachers need in order to put things in action. We have started asking the classroom teachers and the gifted coordinator to work together to have a good plan for working with our son. His needs are very demanding on a teacher, and that teacher needs a lot of support.
