Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Confused about DAS vs other tests

She goes to preschool two days a week but complains that other children do not want to play with her. I've seen her try to play with other children and it's awkward. The other kids always end up getting bored with her or just stand there looking lost. The preschool teacher even told me the other kids stand and stare at DD while she builds elaborate structures out of blocks.

I do need to search the keywords you mentioned. Is not sleeping a gifted trait by chance? DD requires little sleep which is driving us all nuts. She's non-stop!

Thank you for all your help. It's hard to find legitimate info about kids who are identified early on. Not to mention lonely.

I think it is more a matter of assumptions. I guess that because I was ID'd very early as gifted and people often commented on how bright my DS7 was I decided that all of his social issues, like mine, were driven by his (supposed) giftedness.

When he started elementary school with a bang or three we asked for a formal assessment to check for learning disabilities (some dyslexia runs in my family). The results... averaged as average (although there was so much spread between sub-scores they couldn't even calculate a GAI), which the school pointed to as proof that all with OK with him, but the psychologist we were consulting with (and which specialized in LDs) saw as a boatload of indicators for LDs.

When the Asperger's label started being mumbled about at school we got a second, private evaluation from a psychologist who specialized in ASD kids instead... and she diagnosed him with Asperger's.

And now I have been reading extensively about Asperger's, and its presentation in girls, and I started thinking that maybe *that* was my own diagnosis (the oddball who never fitted at school after the early years)... except that all those signs also fit the case of a gifted child who cannot find peers to connect to.

And so we are back to square one, and I am still confused.

I feel that wherever we go we get handed the label we ask for... So, if I bring my son to somebody specializing in gifted kids for a third round of cognitive testing will I get a diagnosis of giftedness? (just kidding! Although I still don't get how comprehension jumped so much in 4 months between WISC and DAS, unless they measure completely different things despite the identical names. Which I guess is the most likely answer).

You might want to check out the book "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults" by James Webb. It does a pretty good job of helping distinguish between the presentation of giftedness and disorders that may be confused with it, or be co-occurring.

BTW, if you ever did want to get a third evaluation, from someone who is familiar with highly-gifted and 2-E kids and who could help you untangle what was what, Ed Amend comes very highly recommended.

There is no "comprehension" subtest on the DAS-II. The verbal subtests are most similar to WISC-IV Vocabulary and Similarities.

Overall, speaking as a user of WISC-IV (and other Wechslers), DAS-II, WJ-III-Cognitive, K-ABC-II, and SB-5, I would say that the DAS-II does the best job of separating various factors (e.g, not conflating visual processing with fluid reasoning and processing speed), and in allowing a tester discretion to choose an item set that is not tortuously easy for a gifted kid (one of my big complaints about Wechslers), with some nice options for out-of-level testing (giving a young child subtests that are designed for older kids and still being able to generate a normed score). It also provides a general cognitive ability score that doesn't load on Working Memory and Processing Speed, so the general score is more properly compared to a WISC GAI. I find that I can generally interpret the information I get on it without needing to do supplementary testing. It's become my go-to IQ test for most purposes, both the "how smart is this kid and what should we tell the school?" kinds of questions and the "why on earth is this kid acting out the way he is and what can we do about it?" kinds of questions.

However, I would not put much stock in IQ testing done at age 3. You're really testing how well the kid can cooperate with the tester, and kids that age vary widely, minute to minute, in terms of how well they can cooperate. Very likely that if you come back and test a few years later, you'll see some differences. I personally don't like testing kids younger than 5 (I've tested a few 4yo once the parents were really well-informed of the limits of reliability and my opinion that most of the time, we don't need to test young kids at all). If the kid was referred for behavioral problems, then fine, you test (within whatever you can manage to do given the behavioral problems!), but you also do other diagnostics to understand the behavior problems better.

Most diagnostic evaluations start with an IQ test, regardless of the reason for referral. It's not about the IQ per se, but about getting a nice broad sample of behavior.

The PPVT-IV is not an IQ test. It is a receptive one-word picture vocabulary test. I say a word, and you have four pictures to look at. You point at the picture that matches the word. I could look in the manual to get more info, but my guess standing on one foot is that it would correlate most highly with Wechsler-test Vocabulary or Information. Those are expressive language, though, and sometimes kids will do a lot better in the recognition format of the PPVT-IV.

I have DAS-II results for my son that include Verbal Comprehension (http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....iguring_out_test_results.html#Post111517). Does that make more sense?

Wait, random googling shows that it has indeed nothing to do with what the WISC calls comprehension:



And this test is normed up to 6:11??? OK, I am officially abandoning any hope of figuring this stuff out . My son was 7:4 when the test was done .

OK - so the social picture you are painting suggests that it's worth a try to see how she does in a preschool classroom with kids who are one or two years older than her. Not a gaurentee, but certianly worth a trial.

Have you asked the preschool to give her a try in an older group?

Yes - some gifted kids sleep much less than others their same age - we have 2 groups -
1) Kids that just plain need less sleep, and
2) Kids that need just as much sleep, but kind of speed up when they are tired and so have trouble getting the full amount of sleep they need. So kids find it boring and uncomfortable to 'dull out' and wait for sleep.

It's sort of hard to tell the difference, unless you figure out how to get your kid to bed earlier for a few weeks and then say - "wow, she seems so much happier" not easy if you've got one who truely needs less sleep!

use sleep as a search term here and see!

Smiles,
Grinity