Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion RIAS Assesment Vs Standford Binet

Due to some issues in school my 5 year old son had the RIAS (Reynolds Intellectual Assesment) completed on him this week by the school pshycologist.

While I expected he might fall in that gifted range I was unprepared for her to tell us he had a total composite score of 160+ with his verbal reasoning at 147 and non verbal at 156. From what I understand the test maxs out at 160 so it becomes fairly inaccurate at those higher ranges.

I am now debating if I should spend the time to get the Standford Binet completed on him so he can apply for groups such as the Davidson institute.

My question is do any of you have experience with the RIAS being completey incorrect and scored way too high? How does it compare to some of the other more extensive tests? He is not quite 5 and a half and I am wondering if it is worth getting
further testing now so I can confirm if he is truly in a higher gifted range or since I am getting such great support from his school as it is that I just leave it alone until the need arises for further testing.

Personally, unless there's some need that won't be met by the school with his current score, I'd wait until he's 6 and can take the WISC.

My DD took the RIAS at 6 1/2 and scored in the MG range, so that wasn't our experience (not that I think she is PG, but based on school performance we expected slightly higher scores). However, I wish I had more info on her. It's a very short test and just doesn't give the same depth of information as the other, lengthier instruments do. In my time here I have seen a fair number of posters saying that their child's scores were fairly different on the RIAS than the SB or WISC.

We also got a one-page report with probably less than 200 words total--not sure if this is typical. Very very short.

Since the school
Met with us we got no report the person that administered the test said in 20 years she had less than 10 kids score as high as he did. My main thinking is having support from the school psychologist and principle I want to see if they are willing to do the Stanford Binet to get a more clear picture because we may move by next year and who knows what a new school system will think. If we test now we can apply for the DYS if his score stays similar. However I don't want to waste time testing if it's inaccurate that young.

Ultramarina- do you usually see the RIAS score inflated higher?

My son took the Rias at 5 1/2- he got >160 on nonverbal, 147 on verbal and his total IQ was >160 (he hit the ceiling). He also got a 99th percentile on the Ravens. We have not needed any other testing so we haven't bothered to do more- Mensa accepted his RIAS score.

No, not necessarily higher. Some have said higher, others have said lower. I wouldn't really be inclined to disbelieve the score, although I don't know if there is any chance that this is one of those tests that can overscore very young children. Based on my (superficial) knowledge of the test, I don't think so--it doesn't rely on reading ability or math calculation or anything. I just think you may be disappointed by the report's brevity; we were.

Well the school Psychologist did the test so she did a full meeting with, Us, the Principal, Counsler, Gifted Coordinator and Teacher because she felt they all needed to understand how Gifted he is and that he will need special accomodations or a different style of learning in the classroom. So I got a pretty long breakdown of how he did. However with fewer subtests I think more extensive testing does give more insight into strengths and weaknesses.

Jacks's Mom your boys scores are close to identical to mine. How old is your boy now? Have you had any issues in school and did you advance him a grade? The reason we did the testing is they moved my son into first grade. He had never had schooling really and so he couldn't write and his teacher immediatley said she didn't think he could handle being in the class. He is so advanced with Reading and Math and ect you know how it is.. That we didn't know what to do he loved learning the new things in 1rst. So we asked for the test to decide if he really couldn't handle being a higher level. In 3 weeks he has caught up fully writting everything they are doing and I think is ready to start moving on to harder Math and more advanced concepts.

Also did you consider doing a portfolio with your two tests to the DYS.

Individual results will vary, but the RIAS has a general reputation for under-representing IQ, because of quick discontinue criteria. Basically, if you miss two questions in a row, you've hit the ceiling, and they move on to the next section. The test is designed for brevity over accuracy.

Mathematically, it makes sense that if a number of people are hitting the quick-discontinue and having their scores deflated, there's a tiny subset that isn't, who experiences significant score inflation as a result.

That's interesting, Dude; I hadn't heard that. DD's test notes, such as they are, say "DD gave up easily if she could not answer right away." In a certain mood, she can get very "Who cares/I don't know" if things are a little challenging. (This is especially true if she has to respond orally vs. a written answer--I'm not sure how the test was administered, but I assume it was oral.)

Dude that is interesting and I understand the mathematical reasoning for what you are saying. How would you tell a child who did well on the test because they are truly that gifted from a anomaly.

My guess is you don't other than observation, time, or additional testing?

My son has traits like the early speech, started reading at 2, learned all the states and capitols by four which includes by shape of state, plus can map most of the world and now it's the solar system he has switched to.

However he seems to jump around from interest to interest. It's not like he is reading Les Miserables or calculating super advanced math problems in his head. He just seems to really get stuff and master it after a very short time.

So I am curious the accuracy of a score like his.

We didn't advance him a grade- I think for many such kids, you trade the academic problems of not grade-skipping for the social problems of grade-skipping.
He is qualified for our full-time gifted program, which starts in 4th grade (he's in second grade). They keep talking about cutting it but hopefully they won't! Our older boy is in it now and it's grade-accelerated by a year. We just have him do little workbooks at home and he's happy with that. He's very social and sweet and he doesn't seem to care if he "learns" things in school that he already knew!

There seems to be a split orientation where some gifted kids are more depth focused and some are more breadth unfocused. That curiousity and wide range of interests combined with the ability to pick up new things quickly is not a "normal" kid trait. Particularly not in the extreme like my DS6 (and myself) and sounds like yours may be.

Dude I enjoyed your post on the New York Times article. A part of me wishes we lived in a area where test scores do allow for such a good education as the free gifted schools there. As I think he would successfully test into one. I think is a broken system there however.

Do you have advice from your experience. Did you grade skip your child? Have you joined the DYS?

I'd say with the scores you've reported, along with the personal observation, the question of whether or not he's gifted has been authoritatively answered. The RIAS does tend to correlate fairly well with other test scores, it's just that where it tends to err, it tends to err in the ways I've described. The tool is what it is, which is a quick way to assess children who may or may not be good candidates for intervention.

He hit the ceiling at 160+, but maybe the score was skewed a full standard deviation too high, and he's really in the 145 range. That's still in the Highly Gifted range, and that's probably the lowest-case scenario. The probability that the score was skewed more than 2 SDs too high, and he's below the 130 threshold commonly accepted as gifted, is ridiculously low.

The question now is, do you have the information you need? If you need access to DYS, and DYS doesn't accept the RIAS (I haven't checked), then a more thorough test tool would be called for. Further testing might also be called for if you have any reason to suspect a learning disability, or if you're just plain confused with his learning styles, which more specific testing can help identify.

In my case, my DD took the RIAS and scored a 135, which was right in line with my expectations. That would not make her DYS-eligible, but made her fully eligible for gifted services at her school, so no further testing is needed there. And since her brain works pretty much the same way mine does, I don't really need any new insights into that. We have no reason to suspect any LDs. So that's pretty much it for testing, we got all the info we needed.

As I say often, individual results will vary. In our case we pushed HARD for a grade skip, but we were stonewalled by an inflexible school district (yes, we took it all the way there), who has never skipped a child despite having a policy clearly spelling a skipping process out. As a result, our DD is homeschooling, and she's registered as a homeschooler at the appropriate grade level. In other words, she was in a 2nd grade class in public school, and we registered her as a 3rd grader for homeschool purposes. She moves pretty much at her own pace, and if she's being held back at all, it's because she's moving so quickly that we really don't see the need to keep her at an inordinate number of hours. She has a short school day and a lot of vacations.

Eventually, we expect to return her to public school, where we expect the grade skip will stick. We've actually met a parent already who homeschooled her child a year ahead for K, and when she went to register her for public school as a 1st grader, the school accepted her, despite the fact that this directly conflicts with the written district policy for accepting K and 1st grade students.

Honestly, I wonder why they bother writing and publishing policies in the first place.

That's our story. We'd have made any number of different choices if some of the many variables involved had been different, though, which is why I qualify any advice based on individual experiences. Here's a sample list of some variable changes that would likely have led us to a different outcome:

- If the district was more open to grade skipping.
- If the in-grade-level-class differentiation the school touted so much actually happened.
- If the daily shuttling between a GT class and a grade level class didn't create a chaotic mess of a learning environment.
- If the district had a magnet GT school where DD could be in a GT class all day.
- If a private GT school were an option in my area.
- If DW had to work, and homeschooling was not an option.