Mumof3 you may want to read Miraca Gross' article on the Davidson site on highly gifted children in the early years where parent identification is regarded as a far more reliable measure than teacher id of young gifted children.-
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10124.aspx So stick with your gut - especially if you already have a score that backs it up. I also highly recommend her book Exceptionally Gifted Children, currently on my bedside table. I wish I'd read it sooner, probably when my DS was 2 (he's now 5) for the insights. It�s helped me to finally put my gifted denial to rest as he so clearly sits alongside the children she describes.
The article also has a section that goes directly to GiftOdds' original question about reliability of early testing:
"Ability and Achievement Testing
Many researchers, however, express a justified concern that the reliability of psychometric testing is lower in the early years of childhood than in the middle years (Robinson and Robinson, 1992) and question whether a high IQ score obtained by a young child is predictive of academic success in later childhood (Jackson and Klein, 1997).
Unfortunately, some early childhood educators take this concern too far, and adamantly refuse to have a young child psychometrically assessed, even when it is obvious that the child is very highly gifted and will require early intervention and an individualized educational program.
...
Both Robinson and Robinson (1992) and Gross (1993) found that the scores of young highly gifted children are likely to rise over successive testings, whereas normally a decrease would be expected in this high-scoring population through regression towards the mean. Ability or achievement testing of highly gifted children under the age of 5 or 6 is likely to result in an under-estimation of the child's true performance, rather than an over-estimation."
Giftodd I gather you haven�t been able to track down the studies quoted in the article about the issues of testing very young gifted children?
One of the thoughts I have is that Gross� research was done almost 20 years ago and there has probably been a substantial growth in the culture of coaching very young children or possible �hothousing� in the intervening years that may start to skew early IQ test results more so than in the past.
