I do have another question if anyone is willing to stick with me a bit longer. I've been conversing w/ dd's math and reading teacher, who is the school GT coordinator, via email to follow up on this.
One reason she feels that some of dd's test scores have suffered, and I see this too, is that dd doesn't tend to see what the test creator is asking. She has very divergent ways of looking at things. The teacher's mention of this was that:
"For example, one of the questions asked for the lowest altitude. The table had a column of highest altitudes and a column of lowest altitudes, and [dd] gave the lowest of the highest altitudes. Then, for the question about the range for the state with the greatest difference in altitudes (Alaska), instead of giving the range for Alaska, [dd] gave the range of highest altitudes. [Dd] may be thinking of online quizzes or riddles, where the answer is tricky, but test questions in school (including MAP, CSAP, ACT, etc.) aren't trying to trick kids with plays on words."
I don't agree about the online quizzes or riddles in that I can't recall a time when dd did any riddles of that sort online or off. She just doesn't look at things in a traditional way.
Any ideas on how to help her see what the test creator is likely getting at? When I discuss with dd why she got these types of questions wrong after the fact, she always understands, but it just isn't the way that she reads them when she is trying to answer them the first time.
Secondly, she is making sloppy mistakes such as overlooking one number or adding in one number too many when calculating the mean or range, for instance. She really is not detail oriented. I don't know if that is something one can correct.
She is extremely creative, though, and she is the type of kid who sees the answer without seeing the intermediary steps that I have to go through. She has a math sense that I just don't have. What she doesn't have that dd12 and I do is detail orientation and an ability to think in a convergent manner (which isn't all good, of course).
