Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Can dysgraphia/dyslexia affect IQ scores?

DS 9 got officially diagnosed with both dyslexia and dysgraphia this week. I suspected he would come back with the diagnosis. It made sense from what I have seen of him. What surprised me a bit were his IQ scores. The tester gave him the Woodcock Johnson Cognitive test, with which I am less familiar. DD 11 scored PG on the WISC. She does not have a learning disability. My son's scores on the WJ cog were pretty much at the low end of gifted, with processing scores and some others being much lower. Some of the subtest scores were in the high 90's percentile. But this doesn't really match what I see. I honestly expected him to come back lower than my daughter in some areas, but higher in others.

My daughter's scores shocked me, so maybe I just don't have a good sense of what gifted really looks like, but my son is usually the head-turner. He has a very quirky but sharp intellect, asking all kinds of questions, and making incredibly creative leaps. He isn't a high achiever type, but he does think very deeply and creatively. He is a very good tournament chess player. No prodigy, but often wins local tournaments. He can listen to high level audio books and have a nuanced understanding both for detail and for foreshadowing, etc. In other words, given what I have seen, I really would have thought his scores would have been higher.

I think some of the what happened could have been that he got a little too creative with some of the answers. The tester told me that when he had to pick two pictures that go together, he took a long time, and so did not get credit for many of his answers. Knowing him, he was over-thinking it. He is super, super creative, and always sees things in a quirky way that other people don't think of.

The tester also said that his visual memory was poor. Again, I'm not sure if this could affect his score. What I see from him academically is that he can be quite advanced in math, etc. He is working 1.5 grades ahead, and catches on to concepts quickly, but has trouble retaining procedures, so he can astound me with how quick he is one day, and the next day, it is like he forgot what he was doing the day before.

I can say that, compared to DD, he doesn't have her vocabulary. That is where I can see her verbal gifts in spades. But he finds patterns so quickly! When we are doing puzzles of some kind, he is the one who will grasp it the fastest. For example, they were taught sudoku together. My son got the idea faster than DD even though he is younger.

I will also add that, FWIW, my son has more gifted personality traits than DD. He can be somewhat intense, with obsessive interests, and has some OE's.


So I would love any insight into whether it is possible his IQ score is an under-representation of his ability. The tester did not think so, but she is not a specialist in 2e. And is there any sense that the WJ might be a "worse" test for a dyslexic and dysgraphic child than the WISC or the SB?

Thanks in advance.

I don't know anything about the WJ test, but with the WISC, I know you can get a GAI when there's a large enough discrepancy between the indices. My ds's processing speed was low average and that fact definitely lowered his FS. In fact, in more balanced profiles, the IQ ends up higher because it's rare. I imagine if your ds took the WISV IV, then you could get the GAI, which would be a better measure of his abilities and even perhaps mre precisely see how his 2e affects the overall score. Maybe the WJ test does that, too. As I said, I don't know anything about that test.

Dysgraphia and dyslexia are going to impact any subtest which requires a child to use a skill that is impacted by either dysgraphia or dyslexia. I am not familiar enough with dyslexia to give you a list of subtests for either the WISC or the WJ-III Cog. that might be impacted - I don't think either test requires a child to actually read any of the questions, but there are subtests that require visual ids. My dysgraphic ds has taken both the WISC and the WJ-III Cognitive Abilities tests - his FSIQ (called "GIA") on the WJ-III was very close if not a little bit higher on the WJ-III than his GAI is on the WISC. The one WJ-III subtest that was impacted by his dysgraphia was visual matching, and on the WISC the subtest score that was impacted was coding. Although there is no "GAI" on the WJ-III there are a larger number of subtests that go into calculating the "GIA" - hence I think the impact of the one very low subtest wasn't as great as it would be on the WISC.

Re the scores coming out lower than you expected, remember that no child is defined by one test score. It's possible that with a different day, a different tester, etc your ds will have a much higher score - or maybe not. Even if he doesn't, that doesn't mean he isn't all that you've seen in him to this point And fwiw, my dd who has a challenge that impacts her ability to read (but does not have dyslexia) had much lower scores on the WJ-III than I would have anticipated based on just knowing her. She's also struggled more and more as time goes on so sometimes I wonder if her scores would have been higher when she was younger. She hasn't had the WISC (yet) but on the WJ-III Cog. the one subtest that was substantially lower was associative memory (I can't remember the exact name of the subtest). Her reading-assessment type tests have scores that are mostly very strong except the subtests impacted by that one ability.

"I can say that, compared to DD, he doesn't have her vocabulary. That is where I can see her verbal gifts in spades. But he finds patterns so quickly! When we are doing puzzles of some kind, he is the one who will grasp it the fastest." I suspect dyslexia is coming into play here - no matter how many audiobooks your ds has listened to or how many deep conversations he's been a part of. I've found that vocabulary growth for my dd with the reading challenge seems to be slower than I would have anticipated based on just "knowing her".

"The tester also said that his visual memory was poor. Again, I'm not sure if this could affect his score. What I see from him academically is that he can be quite advanced in math, etc. He is working 1.5 grades ahead, and catches on to concepts quickly, but has trouble retaining procedures, so he can astound me with how quick he is one day, and the next day, it is like he forgot what he was doing the day before."

This is also a lot like my dd with the reading challenge.

"FWIW, my son has more gifted personality traits than DD. He can be somewhat intense, with obsessive interests, and has some OE's."

I am a bit of a skeptic about the lists of "gifted traits" - not because they don't exist in gifted children, but because they can exist in children who are not gifted too. My EG child is not my most intense child - not by a longshot. I have known children with obsessive interests who are not gifted or anywhere near it. Same goes for the OEs. So while I think you will find gifted children who have lots of the "gifted traits" checked off on those types of lists, I think you'll also find gifted children who *don't* fit those lists all that neatly. If you didn't know my ds well, he absolutely would not at first glance appear to be the EG child in my family, but my reading-challenged dd often does appear EG - until she has to do schoolwork lol!

Hope some of that helps -

polarbear

ps - I actually like the WJ-III Cog test better than the WISC for children with LDs - both because of the number of subtests and because of the way it can be paired with the WJ-III Tests of Achievement to further define areas of strength and weaknesses.

I am not familiar with the WJ Cog but imagine that it probably is not so very different from the WISC. As far as disgraphia, the only subtest affected is coding (1 of 2 in the processing speed section). As for dyslexia, I don't recall that any reading is required. Of course, there could be an indirect effect to the extent that dyslexia has impacted the acquisition of knowledge/skills, which feed into the measure of crystallized knowledge (verbal comprehension index on WISC).

In my opinion, any of these IQ tests may either overestimate or underestimate "true" intellectual ability on any given day. Different IQ tests may also not correlate exactly as they do not measure exactly the same kinds of ability to the same proportion, some versions are more in need of renorming than others, etc. I believe that they are more useful as an approximation of a general range.

Furthermore, your DS' actual functioning in real life is probably more indicative of true ability and ultimately is what actually counts more than an IQ number that may or may not be given weigh by the people in authority.

I always find the "gifted traits" a bit suspect. Our district acknowledges that many kids have these traits to some extent but tried to distinguish it by focusing on the frequencies these traits are demonstrated.

Thanks for the replies.

I agree about the gifted traits being kind of dubious. I don't put much stock in those either, but they are there, and it is just a piece of what makes it feel like those numbers don't fit.

Quantum, you are very right about actual functioning, and there he really is an impressive kid. It's nice to have the numbers back up your own perceptions, but I guess they don't always.

As Quantum2003 pointed out, the coding section on the WISC can be affected by dysgraphia. In my DD's case, we also saw her block design scores on the WISC greatly reduced from where we expected, which could be from dysgraphia or simply from her visual/motor integration issues. Remember, Block Design is timed and requires manipulation of small pieces.

Thanks Revmom. Is block design a subtest on the WJ? I thought it was only on the WISC? I guess I am curious if dyslexia could affect the fluid reasoning score, or the verbal score. I can see that it really affected the fluency scores. I feel like I would understand this better if he had taken the WISC.

I forgot to mention in my original post that an assessments with a developmental optometrist found that he was farsighted, but compensating. This meant that any kind of close work was a strain for him, and he would get headaches when he read. This undoubtedly added to his becoming a reader late in the game. We completed vision therapy in January, and now he wears glasses for close work.

Sorry, I was only referencing the mention of sections on the WISC. I will edit my previous post. I do not know about the WJ, it's one of the few tests one of my 3 DDs hasn't taken.

With reference to other tests, I will add that in addition to Coding and Block Design on the WISC, my DDs disability (visual motor integration/dysgraphia) showed the most with "Block Tapping" on the SBV and with the Quantitative score (due to it being timed) on the COGAT. These two subtest scores were what made me pursue testing with the OT.