...I don't think you can use things such as vocabulary usage as neccessarily a marker of giftedness. Exposure would play a big part there and a very gifted child in a poverty situation with little access to books or libraries will probably come up very short in that category....
Vocabulary is still 1/3 of your VCI score on the WISC, though, so the creators of that IQ test do, obviously, believe it to be a component of verbal intelligence. None of these kids come from poverty circumstances. Most of the ones I can think of have higher income homes than ours and plenty of access to books, libraries, etc.
Back to the tests, are these grade level tests? I think an average intelligence child with a good teacher good easily score 95% on a grade level test.
To get into GT reading or math here, you would be at around the 95th percentile on, yes, a grade level achievement test and the verbal or quantitative part of the CogAT, which was why I asked about the CogAT or other group
ability tests. I, like you, totally understand a motivated child who likes to read scoring in the 95th percentile on a grade level reading achievement test, for instance. What I do not understand is how s/he would also score in the 95th percentile on the verbal part of the CogAT to continue my verbal child example if said child is clearly not too bright. I'm wondering whether these group ability tests are actually measuring
ability vs. something else: achievement, practice...
