Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment DAS versus SB V?

Hi all!

My basic question is about the Differential Ability Scale. More details are below, but the gist of it is to find out if anyone has experience with it, and how reliable is it in testing for highly gifted kids.

More details:
DS6 is current in DYS; he was tested with SBV and WJ III. We recently had our DD5 tested; she is also quite advanced, although to be honest, we really hadn't anticipated her being up at the DYS level. In her case, we used a psychologist who does testing in the home, who used the Differential Ability Scale, rather than the SB V [she can't take the WISC for another six months]. She felt this would be an equally valid test, and likes it because it does not take as long to administer to a gifted child who is relatively young and can't always focus for so long. Plus it cost us about a quarter of what the other tester charged. She has been doing this for a long time, and is retired from working for the school system; she also tested a friend's daughter who is in DYS, so I know she has worked with gifted kids. In the end, DD5 ended up scoring higher on the DAS than DS6 did on the SBV. This correlated reasonably well with the Woodcock Johnson, so I don't think it's a fluke, but wasn't sure how well the DAS correlates with the other ability testing.

Thanks for any information you have!

Susan

DS6 had a horrible experience with a subset of the DAS 2 (even refused to do whole sections), but I fully believe that this had more to do with the fact that it was his first testing experience, he finds testing stressful, and he had terrible rapport with the school psychologist. I believe Aimee Yermish, a psychologist who specializes in giftedness and gifted testing, likes the DAS 2 a great deal.

I believe that the specific strength of the DAS is the ability to test a very wide range of ages, but I have no idea how this stacks up against other tests for overlapping age ranges. I consider them all to generate approximations anyway, and after reading somewhat conflicting information on which tests are better for what reasons (SB5 being better for "mathy" kids, SB5 non-verbal subtests being polluted with verbalishness, etc.) I can't venture even a layperson's opinion. However, I do think it's significant that the achievement scores are in the same ballpark.

However, if I were to venture that opinion , it would be that I'd expect rough equivalence throughout the normal range of the tests. They are normed against fairly large sample populations, and have the same or similar standard deviations, and are intended and designed to test the same things. I think that for very young children (if I recall correctly the DAS 2 can be administered as young as 2.5) the younger the child, the fewer long-term conclusions one could draw from the results.

Thanks for the feedback, Iucounu. I was quite surprised by the outcome, and wondering whether the test was any less reliable than the longer tests... It seemed to be such a quick survey.