Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Need a little help with ITBS scores (Kindergarten)

We pulled DS5.4 out of public Kindergarten to homeschool right after Thanksgiving and since we wanted to have at least some data on hand, mainly for the school if we wanted to put him back into public school anytime soon, and because we wanted to see where he's at, we gave him the ITBS test. These were his percentile scores ...

Vocab 91 (he struggled with the black and white pictures)
Reading words 98
Word Analysis 98
Listening 99
Language 99
Math 98 (missed one question basically due to non exposure to the subject but could be remedied in 1 day if we wanted to)
Core total 99

So, pretty much in everything he was placed at the 2nd half of 1st grade or 1st half of 2nd grade equivalent. (He was tested as Kindergartner mid-year, and is young for his grade as he made the Kidner cut off just by a few days) So, here are my questions ...

1. my understanding is that would be 50th percentile for the grade equivalent, right?
2. if we want to retest next year (or at the end of this school year) should we go again with at his grade level test or should we do it at a one grade higher level to get more data rather then hit the ceiling at 99th percentile?
3. can I consider the data reliable when I had to basically scribe for him (fill in the answers he pointed at) due to his poor fine motor skills? I did not interfere with the test itself, but had to help him this way as otherwise he would not had been able to complete it at all.

I was really surprised how well he did on the reading related parts of the test. He's our child who we think might be dyslexic / dysgraphic so this makes me wonder if maybe his issues have more to do with attention rather than learning disabilities (at least in respect to dyslexia)

Anyone who can answer, please chime in. I'd really appreciate any suggestions.

master of none - thank you! as for the scribing, thankfully for these little kids it's just a matter of filling the circle and that's all they need to do so what I did was wait for him to show me the circle and I filled it in. He did do quite a few of them himself but it was all kinds of scribbles and nothing that would resemble a filled in circle, which is why I stepped in and we finished it with him showing me the answers. He spent only 1 complete trimester in public K at which point we pulled him out. He seemed to had been struggling in areas such as writing and reading and was too far ahead and really bored in Math and during some other activities so he spent those couple hours at school either angry because his hands weren't up to the writing or waiting on others to get the basic math concepts. Seeing the scores makes me even more glad we pulled him out for now. His reading is now way better than just couple weeks ago and he's no longer frustrated with it because we're going at his speed and concentrating on what he needs and jumping over things that we find pointless.

We do want to put him back into public school sometime by 2nd or 3rd grade mainly because he's very social, which is why I even bothered with the testing in the first place. But seeing how hard it is for him to actually go through the testing, when we're ready for him to go back, we'll probably use private 2E tester rather than rely on school. He has really bad sensory processing issues (the main OT where we go for therapy said she has only seen very few kids that had it this bad), though we've been seeing a lot of improvements the last couple of months, and the school never even tried to accommodate for it and always blamed it on "immaturity" and "behavior issues". So if / when he goes back to public school, the first thing will be asking for in his IEP will be specific accommodations rather than what we were told previously ... "we'll address any issues if they arise"

Overall, seeing the scores, I do think that an actual objective professional testing might be needed in the future to make sure he's getting what he needs.