Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WISC - IV extended scoring question- NAGC v. WISC

Daughter's scores are at the bottom of this post. There appears to be a discrepancy between the statement on the NAGC website and the WISC technical bulletin, see quotes from each below.

Thank you so much for your help and insight. Our daughter's neuropsychologist did not do the extended scoring because she only had 19 in one subtest, similarities. Her tester said that our daughter needed to have more than one 19 to apply extended scoring. The neuropsychologist said she did not see scores like this very often, but said extended scoring was not warranted.

Here is what NAGC's website says:

"Despite these limitations, testers should consult the Extended Norms if a child achieves at least one scaled score of 19 or two of 18 and modify scaled, Composite, GAI and Full Scale IQ scores accordingly. These can be found in Technical Report #7, available at http://www.pearsonassessments.com/N...C-8E4A114F7E1F/0/WISCIV_TechReport_7.pdf or through a search for �WISC-IV Extended Norms.� "

That bulletin in the link states that extended scoring is useful when a child has the ceiling score of 18 or 19 for two or more subtests.

What do you think? The test is over a year old.


Verbal Comprehension:

Similarities 19
Vocabulary 17
Information 17
Comprehension was not given, information substituted instead.

Perceptual Reasoning:

Block Design 13
Picture Concepts 17
Matrix Reasoning 15

Working Memory

Digit Span 12
Letter-Number Sequencing 11

Processing Speed

Coding 7
Symbol Search 12

GAI: 147
VCI: 146

Why are we testing?

My oldest, too, didn't have extended norms applied & she only had one 19, but I generally think that a high score is a high score and worth looking at and considering. Mine was also tested probably before use of the extended norms was common.

You will need more than the 19, though, to ascertain if they apply. Some 19s move, some don't. I believe that those 12, 15, 19 type of #s are are scaled scores. You also need the raw scores that feed into those scaled scores to figure out if her 19 would become a 20 or 21 or whatever it might be.

eta: I find it very odd that comprehension was not given at all. It is fine to substitute another test if that is allowable, but a substitute test is usually given in addition to the standard tests and then used as a substitute. The standard three tests in each subsection are not normally just dropped without giving them at all. Do you have any info on why the tester did that?

Thank you for your insights. I had her tested almost two years ago, as part of a comprehensive evaluation. Our daughter has Asperger's syndrome.

At this point, I would like to use the scores to apply for DYS, but the 147 is pretty borderline. And I need the achievement piece.

According to her pyschologist, who would not show me the raw scores, our daughter's 19 would move up if she ran the extended scoring. But she said that there was no need to run it, because of the language in the technical bulletin.

The psychologist said that she started the comprehension but our daughter would not cooperate and acted silly and made jokes at the questions. I did not realize that the other tests are usually supplements, not substitutes. Thank you for that insight. I do not know whether she completed comprehension or not.

The general rule of standardized testing is that you follow the rules. I don't think it was inappropriate of the tester to say, "The technical bulletin says to use it if there are two scores of 18 or 19, and that is not the case here." However, the language in the technical bulletin says, "are useful" not "are only used when." She probably could have gone either way.

What I think is of more concern is that a kid with Asperger's Syndrome, who might be expected to do less well on Comprehension, and who showed every sign of doing just that, had that subtest discontinued and essentially marked as "spoiled" without her actually doing so, and without that choice being clearly made and explained in the report itself.

The Wechsler manuals don't allow for, "I thought the kid was going to do badly on this one so I'm doing the other one instead." It's only if a kid really honestly spoils a subtest (e.g., I had an autistic kid once who marked "yes / no / yes / no / yes / no / yes / no" all the way down Symbol Search, and refused all of my efforts to get him to do the actual task), then you *say so* in the report. In that kiddo's case, I didn't report a score at all for that subtest -- it was a completely invalid test of his actual ability to rapidly process visual information.

But if an otherwise bright kid is just getting silly on the early Comprehension items, I would wonder if perhaps she *knew* she didn't know the answers and was trying (successfully) to distract the tester. That's different from spoiling... that's sandbagging, or at the best, plain old tanking. If she tanks a subtest because she honestly doesn't know the answers, then that *is* her score and it should be reported as such. Sorry.

I'm writing a report right now on a young adult with GT/ADHD, who has really strong achievement in mathematics but no ability to concentrate. On the WAIS (different from the WISC), for some idiotic reason, they switched from Digit-Span and Letter-Number for the Working Memory factor to Digit-Span and Arithmetic. So the kid got a rotten score on DS, rotten on LN, and ceilinged AR. I reported the WM score as calculated on the basis of DS and AR... and *then* also calculated what it would have been based on DS and LN (which included refiguring FSIQ as well), and discussed the difference and the clinical significance of that difference within the report.

The point is that you're not allowed to change the rules of the test. You're allowed to ask some "what-ifs" and to use the supplementary test information as a way to put things into perspective. That's why test interpretation is a complex process. But you can't throw out data just because it doesn't agree with your hypothesis.

(FWIW, this set of scores, including the assumed low score on Comprehension, looks quite typical of what I see in GT/AS kids on this test.)

Thank you, Aimee, that is interesting. I didn't pin her down too much, though perhaps I should have.

This tester was one of the professionals who did a battery of tests and found no sign of Asperger's. So she may not have looked for the pattern you describe.

Is comprehension similar to some of the subtests on the WJ-III? Also, when can she be retested with the WISC?