I have mixed feelings about early testing, based mostly on the fact that I had such a lopsided PG child for quite a while--extremely early math but no early reading at all (and contrary to what you will read from Linda Silverman, my son had no visual or learning difficulties to account for this. He simply was not an early reader).
It took him until age 7.5 to even out, and in fact his verbal abilities have now outpaced his math abilities every time we check
But the difference between his IQ scores at age 5 and at age 7.5 (two different tests) was really quite striking, simply because of the change in his ability to read. If we had gone simply on those early scores, we would have had pretty poor information. In fact, I am very grateful to one gifted school administrator who told me that she saw a real dissonance between his 5-year-old IQ test and his WJ scores at 6 and recommended further testing for that reason. She was absolutely right.
Fortunately or unfortunately, since we had no access to a gifted program of any kind before 3rd grade (and not much after that
) .. class placement was not an issue in the testing, we were simply looking for diagnostic information. I hate to think what would have happened if we'd been dependent on the early testing for educational placement reasons.
