Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Will learning to read and write improve IQ scores?

Mumofthree, sorry to hear your DD had that experience. I hope it has not stood in the way for her. I wonder if some testers might see a 4 year old having an emotionally based lack of completion as a "spoiled" subtest and therefore administer a supplemental subtest to be used instead in score calculation. That would seem fair to me were I a test author as I don't think at that age they are meaning to test simple compliancy. Or maybe they are.

Ashley -- Just for future reference, the wisc iv guide I am reading mentions the matrix reasoning subtest specifically as more difficult to interpret if a child has color blindness. ie it sounds like there may be some aspects that depend on color recognition.

Polly she wasn't bothered at all, I was cranky about it pulling her fsiq down and having to retest because school "didn't see it".... Retested 6 months later wih a gifted specialist (who said she would have discarded a subtlest like that as spoiled), and sure enough DD gained half an SD on the FSIQ, half of which came from not having that one much lower subtest in the mix. The other half of the improvement came from a higher VS score on the sb5 than PRI on the wppsi. Both my kids did better on the non verbal section of the sb5, but had almost no difference on the verbal, not sure why.

That's interesting Polly - my ds is red-green color bond and did really well on matrix reasoning, but had a dip in picture concepts. Is the guide you're reading online? I'm just wondering if there are other places in the WISC where color blindness might be an issue.

polarbear

This is very interesting to me. DS5 tanked on both Picture Vocabulary and Matrix reasoning, did very well (98th percentile) on other sections, and is red/green colorblind. I would love to see that guide, too. They only do a very abbreviated set of Woodcock Johnson and WISC, so the two sections had a large impact on his overall score.

Just another data point on the red/green colorblindness: my son, like polarbear's, did very well on Matrix Reasoning and is quite colorblind. Picture Concepts was pretty respectable, too. (Coding...now, that's another story.)

Regarding color blindness:
The reason that some kids with color blindness do well in picture concepts is because there are "varying degrees" to color blindness. Some can identify only certain shades of red/green colors and some cannot identify any shades of red/green colors.
The children who are bright learn to compensate for their color blindness by identifying these colors by their "brightness" and "intensity". My son gets thrown for a loop when he encounters the shades of brown that are created from a combination of green and red. Brown looks like green to him. And he used to pick up a brown crayon and color grass as brown - he has since learnt to read the name of the color on the crayon before making his color choice - his way of compensating for his handicap. And he is marginally better at recognizing colors on paper than on an electronic screen. The reason we suspected color blindness and had it tested was that he was working on an online "gifted" program - in the logic test he was taking there was a question about 3 frogs - an yellow, green and brown frog and he was asked to click on the correct frog. The answer to the question was "green frog" - my son said "green frog" verbally and repeatedly picked the picture of the brown frog and clicked on it and got the prompt that said "wrong answer". He was frustrated and sad and was in tears because he could not get it right even though he knew the correct answer. What I am trying to say is that logic reasoning tests do not take into account such discrepancies in abilities (even though the tester knows that such things do not affect the IQ of the child). I am pretty convinced that these factors skew the outcome of IQ tests - especially when administered by a psychologist as part of a busy day where there are a dozen or more kids scheduled to go one after the other for school admission testing.