I have a question about processing speed and how it affects standardized achievement tests. My child was tested at age 4 years 11 months, when we like many others encountered school and the school found him overly active "but in a different way". At that time his scores on the WPPSI-R: verbal 159/perf 139/fsiq 159. His WIAT was 149 reading/143 math reasoning/ 119 spelling/ 151 numerical operations. At 5 years 7 months we followed up with the SB L-M which gave a score of 188. Based on those scores the psychologist recommendation application to DYS. However, when we asked the new gifted school that we had chosen director for her recommendation for the application she replied "why would you want to do that" implying that her school would take care of all of his needs. Not wanting to raise a stir and happy to find a supposed match for our son, I let the DYS application go. The school spoke all of the Social/Emotional language that was new to us and my son made great friends.
Unfortunately, after five years at the school it was my son broke down emotionally and required a school change. Through those five years we slowly learned that my son's learning style and interest areas were not a good match for the school, so we left. We enrolled him at our local middle school with a new interested principal and an enthusiastic GT coordinator. The school asked that we update our private testing. We did and he achieved the following scores at 11 yrs 11 mos:
WISC-IV VCI 155/PRI 145 WMI 126/PSI 103/FSIQ 144/GAI 165
He just completed MAP testing at 12 years 4 mos scored: 244 Reading/232 General Science/235 Science Processes/236 Language Usage/ 272 Math
Other things we know of our child is that he hates the feel and sound of a pencil scratching on paper to the point of a gag reaction. The new school allows his work to be typed or written in pen when necessary. Also, I had him read the "stealth dyslexia" article which he says fairly accurately describes his reading and spelling experience.
He has taken the explore test twice and while his scores qualify him for summer programs and the like in Math and Science, he has never finished a test section, in part I believe to his processing speed, in part to his pencil aversion, and in part to his lack of experience from the old school in taking standardized tests. The recent better results on the MAP test which had no time contraints and which was done without a pencil on a computer give me hope that certain achievement tests can provide better reflections than others for him. Does anyone have any suggestions about future achievement testing. For instance, should I seek some kind of accomodation for slow processing? Also, how would DYS treat an application from my child.
Thanks for any input you can give.
