Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion is it becoming true...

that they even out in third grade?

DD8 fall reading MAP is back and her score is lower than it was in fall of second grade. Yes she went from 98th percentile to 71st. Her WIAT results show her reading at a 5th grade level. Could there be a 2e issue? Her FSIQ is 124 and GIA is 132. Her working memory and processing speed were very average WMI 107 and PSI at 103


any thoughts?

Thanks
one very frustrated momma

That's likely a result of her not having been actually TAUGHT anything in the past year. It's not that they even out, but that the other kids are being challenged and pushed ahead, while your child is left to their own devices because they are ahead. Unless you are seeing something other than that MAP score issue, I wouldn't suspect 2e, I'd suspect the school is letting her just coast along.

I agree with epoh. I don't think it's possible to start off ahead and not have extra gas in the tank, so to speak. These kids are wired differently.

My DD9 for example had/has MASSIVE anxiety issues so they strongly pushed to put her in a 2/3 split when she was in third grade. I knew this would be disastrous for her grades but I was desperate to address the anxiety so I trusted her grade 2 teacher who was advocating for this. Sure enough, her grade 3 report card was full of comments about how she had trouble focusing, was often lost in thought, and needed constant reminders to finish her work. Socially though she came out of her shell a bit.

In grade 4 I wanted to do it my way - I requested (and they complied) a 4/5 split. The class was mostly 5's and some kids were 2 years older. Sure enough, DD's marks improved and she was accepted into the gifted math program starting this month.

Anyway, frannie, just like your DD, mine had an academically disappointing grade 3, but it was because of her environment. Maybe the same is true in your DD's case?

Do you have the scaled scores in addition to the percentiles? Did that drop too?

My dd was tested on the MAP reading 3 times last year (6th grade), fall, winter and spring. Her scaled score was highest in the fall and lowest in the spring. My theory is that her fall score was so high (I watched her teacher gasp when she looked at the report) that fluctuations are bigger. Also, the novelty for dd was probably wearing off after the first test in fall.

Her score at the end of first (spring) was 193 spring second 208 and fall of third 197.

That seems within somewhat normal bounds of fluctuation between tests, assuming no progress. In addition many students experience a moderate dropoff in scores over the summer because they're not in school. Unless you were teaching her and she was reading a lot over the summer, I wouldn't bat an eye at the difference in the last two scores.

I agree with lucounu, I wouldn't worry about the small drop in scores - could be any # of reasons. If there's a drop in percentile, it's most likely not from your dd "flattening out" but rather due to beginning reading skills happening across a spectrum in a wide variety of skills - that's what I've always understood the "3rd grade flattening out" statement to mean - children who start reading early aren't necessarily going to be the children at the top of the reading pack in 3rd grade because not all children start reading early (not even all gifted children). There are also probably a number of children who's reading scores are depressed in early elementary due to vision or other challenges who "catch up" to where they would have been without the issue once their challenges were recognized in school and corrected or accommodated. I've got two of those kiddos - one with visual challenges, one with a memory challenge. They both made huge leaps and bounds in reading skills, speed and comprehension between 2nd and 3rd grade.

polarbear

Why are you asking about 2e? Was there something in the previous testing that suggested something? If you have WIAT and WISC testing, that's a more accurate picture than the fluctuation on the one test.

Reading does start to shift gears in third, more towards thinking about what you're reading beyond comprehension of who-what-why-when-where. Is she in a reading rut at home? We've had leaps at home simply by putting fairies or talking cats aside for a few weeks in favor of a different genre.

OT:

This is NOT likely to be relevant to your situation--BUT...in my own peer group (parents all highly educated) I am seeing that kids who were slower starters but who I could tell were quite bright are much closer to DD's reading level now. For instance, many read Harry Potter over the summer. These kids were nowhere near her in K and 1, but they blossomed. These are third graders. So I see where that saying comes from. It takes some of them longer to "get" the skill--but once it's down, a bright kid who likes books may really start to fly with it. (In fact, these kids are probably all gifted. Who knows how much? It would be arrogant of me to presume I know! They will be honors/AP students. They just didn't have the really startling early takeoff that DD did.)

geofizz, I ask about 2e because her processing speed and working memory are significantly lower than her perceptual

FSIQ 123 94th percentile
GAI 132 98th percentile

similarities 14
vocabulary 16
comprehension 12

block design 14
picture concepts 16
matrix reasoning 15

digit span 11
letter/number sequencing 12

coding 10
symbol search 11

test raw composite score percentile
VCI 42 124 95
PRI 45 131 98
WMI 23 107 68
PSI 21 103 58

My son did not even out by third grade. He was homeschooled and, if anything, he was more ahead in third grade than previously. However, I would think that it would be quite possible for a child who is not being challenged in school to appear to even out.

I agree with Kai. If anything, this is a reason why we enrolled DD in a public (albeit 'virtual') charter school at that point (3rd)-- we were seeing a gap that was actually widening into fairly frightening proportions, given that her maturity was still just about keeping pace with her age-mates. We enrolled her to slow her down some. True story.

So she was a wayyyyyyy-wayyyyy beyond material 3rd grader who was afterschooled/enriched, a still-well-beyond 4th grader who also completed 5th that year without really even challenging herself (oh, plus enrichment), and a GT 6th grader who found (only) math a bit if a challenge because we had skipped her forward into pre-algebra... etc. etc. It really hasn't been until this year that I see anything like actual "appropriate" curriculum, and she's 13 and taking 2 AP courses, one of them Physics.

No way would she have "evened out" with her now 7th and 8th grade agemates, because we couldn't seem to keep her from reading and learning more on her own. It does limit her TIME to do that kind of thing if we have her enrolled in a school situation that demands busy-work from her at least part of the day, though, so it attenuates rate. On the other hand, I do believe that she'd have been several teachers' worst nightmares in a bricks-and-mortar setting with agemates.

Wow!

I have to kind-of agree that this is possibility. This happened to my husband, sort-of. They actually thought he was "slow" in the early years, all his "gifted friends" went off to whatever they called it "Leap" or something like that. He was in a special something class/activity (he had hypotonia but I don't think they knew about it back then so it was never labled or addressed). Anyway, I don't know all the details but in 4th grade I believe it was his mom went to the parent-teacher conference fully prepared to hear about and dscuss my DH's deficits and the teacher was like - "Uh your son is very, very smart." By middle school he was doing much better than his "gifted" buddies and was grade accelerated in math classes in middle school and high school. He's one of the samrtest and non-arrogant people I know and he is a brilliant computer engineer today.

So, I believe that it can definitely happen and probabaly does happen a fair amount.

I don't agree with that. Some kids entering K have been taught, worked with, others don't know the alphabet. There is not necessarily a correlation with their innate ability.

I'm not saying they all even out, but it is true that by third grade as compared to K they have all had exposure, and instruction, and any effects of early interest or instruction will be gone.

If academic skills are too charged, how about gross motor skills. My oldest started walking at nine months because she was small, light, and very interested in it. She was queen of the playground compared to all the other babies, running, climbing, jumping, while they were all crawling, and a reasonable number were not even doing that. But, fast forward to three or four years old, and some of those kids who weren't even crawling are stronger, or taller, or more co-ordinated than her. They've "evened out" in the same way kids do with academics. They're not all the same, but the distribution of skill is not correlated with the distribution of skill at the point where it was an emergent skill.

BUT. The OP's kid has a gifted-level IQ score. Surely that counts for quite a lot. If her child was simply an untested high achiever, that would be different.

Ultramarina - that's what I meant... you can't coach a kid into a high IQ (looking back at my post I see that I didn't word it well). Tallulah are you referring to the hothoused kids? Because you'd be right about that, for sure. Meanwhile some untested high achievers are hothoused, and some have high IQ's. As for the ones who have tested high... is it even possible to get a false positive for giftedness? A false negative, sure.. there are many things that could suppress a score.

I think that it's possible to get a false positive for giftedness, meaning that you test having a high IQ, but you aren't really gifted.

I agree-- particularly true in younger kids who have been hothoused by well-meaning (but Tigerish) parents.

What I think cannot be mistaken is the rate at which gifted children learn, or how rapidly they attain mastery.

I do not think that a child who is not gifted can, for example, go from basic decoding skills (e.g. Bob books) to late high school reading ability (no, not just decoding, but actual comprehension) in just a few weeks or months.

The problem with this idea of 'evening out' is that while it may be true that other kids learn to read during this period, and achieve basic numeracy... if a gifted child is allowed to learn, too, then they will still be traveling that road in a faster car, if that makes sense.

So while the differences may be more subtle than "this three year old can read, and all these others can't," there is little doubt that the third grader who has been fully literate for YEARS will have experienced much more during that time than his/her newly literate classmates will have in the last 18 months.

And they should put more distance between them and their same age peers as they go through life.

Because it's all about the trajectory.

People in the same intellectual cohort will eventually even out with each other.

People in different intellectual cohorts will eventually move further away from each other.

Indeed. Going back to the race car metaphor, it doesn't matter if you can do 200mph, because with all the other traffic, there's nowhere to go at that speed.

And so, what we need are race tracks. What we often get instead is a fast lane, and slower traffic keeps wandering in where it doesn't belong.

Except that in some cases the 200mph car explodes, destroying itself and other cars because that's what happens when it runs too long at 25mph.

YES!!

... and even when engineered to run reliably at such low speeds, a supercar may seize up when forced to comply with the restrictions of a public halting device.

Well, yes, but "gifted" (intentional scare quotes) is a pretty huge range. There are more "gifted" kids who couldn't go at twice the normal pace than those who could, due to the normal distribution. And even then the trajectory levels out. Yes, kid A went from 0 to sixth in reading in six months, but they're probably only reading eight or ninth grade by third grade, and kids who have been slow but steady and took three years to get there will appear about the same. Then look again at sixth grade and they're still probably going to be not that far apart.

No, not really, I'm speaking more from experience of watching my friends children (so I'm not going to offer specifics), but with an IQ spread of 30 points, all in the gifted range, the different trajectories were very apparent, (probably IQ based, I suppose, but then a child whose parent works with them before school is going to have a flatter trajectory) and you definitely saw them doing this evening out - starting with a huge range before school, due to their interests and parenting, then all the different trajectories, and settling to a range that is a lot smaller than before school, and not necessarily in the same order as before school. This is with reading, not math.

I don't think there would necessarily be any correlation at all with IQ and hothousing, don't you think?


I definitely disagree with that. Not all knowledge comes through books, and an involved educated parent combined with a BBC addiction can do a lot. Kind of like people who teach their kids the letters instead of teaching them that if you dig just the right way you can make a moat around your sandcastle, or helping them break down sounds in words, or recount a story, or predict what happens next. IYKWIM, and I don't mean it combatively.

I don't know if my son would have evened out by third grade if I had left him in our public school. When my son was almost through with kindergarten he had made what would normally be a passing score (but not the required 90% because of his handwriting) on an end of first grade test to see if he could skip first grade since he was already reading and comprehending at a 5th grade level, but the kindergarten teacher was recommending holding him back in a transitional first grade (year in between kindergarten and first grade) so that he could work on fine motor skills without OT even though he has a disability that affects fine motor skills. The principal, a relative of mine, arranged for me to talk to a first grade teacher at the school who was the mother of two gifted boys and was working toward a master's in special ed where she learned even more about gifted education. She looked at samples of my son's work. She had already heard about him. She told me that she thought he was probably highly gifted. Her advice was that I should put him in private school or homeschool him. I told her that I couldn't afford private school and didn't think I could homeschool my son. She gave me some teaching materials and made sure I understood that I would have to homeschool my son and that I should absolutely not under any circumstances let him go to that school.

She was right. We did homeschool. He did not even out.

Our wonderful small town school with the amazing football team that our relatives just love because their kids who are very good in football are treated like royalty, would not have been a good school for my son. The school has a bullying problem. Their ACT scores are below state average. Yet the relatives still believe it is a great school and don't want to hear otherwise. My son's piano teacher recently took her child out of this amazingly wonderful school because the focus is definitely not on academics and her smart kid did not fit in. People in our small town were giving her a hard time about it.

I had to learn to trust my gut feeling on what was best for my child. That was hard to do. Educational experts with years of experience were telling me very different things. I am grateful for message boards like this one because they often gave me better advice than the experts, but then I guess they are the real experts.

My son is now 14 and 2E with some sensory issues or overexcitabilities and dyspraxia and he is going through some difficult and distracting, painful physical issues now that make it impossible for him to enjoy most activities with kids his age, but he is still smarter than I am and he learns more quickly than I ever did if given the opportunity to learn the way he learns best.

To be honest, I'm starting to think there's a lot more gestalt to IQ and potential than the tests can ever give us. I see a really vast range even in DD's magnet where the kids are all 130+. (Of course, I don't know anybody's individual score or their 2e issues--there seem to be quite a lot of 2e kids.)

It's worth pointing out at this point that the differences between all of the groups below are pretty much the same:

- MG (IQ 130) and PG (160)
- MG and normal (100)
- Normal and mild retardation (70)

Sprinkle in personality and environment differences along with cognitive differences, and you'd expect to see a wide range.

Across the entire lifetime or only across the K-JD age range?

Yes, and factor in different areas of strength (i.e. the math kids Vs. the language kids, for example) and how their strengths and weaknesses influence how they interact with their environment, and the differences can be even more pronounced.

As students mature, there becomes more interplay between potential, motivation, and achievement. Motivated bright students might outperform a complacent gifted student. The measuring of mastery is not the same as IQ.

I really want to see a longitudinal study over time.

However, I still don't think that IQ is measuring quite what we want it to measure.

Sure. But given the rareness of IQ 160 kids, most of these kids are probably in the 130-140 range. I supposed there could be a 150 or something. I seriously doubt we have a 160--I don't know the real likelihood, but my city isn't very large. That kid probably isn't in public school even if he/she lives here.

I think it's more likely that these children are within a 10- to 15-point spread. But I've seen their work, and it's all over the place. Some of the kids who are great at writing are struggling with the math, and vice versa.