Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WJ III Ach Question

DD4 had the WJ Ach administered and there is a monstrous disparity between the Broad Reading RPI Score and the Brief Reading RPI score. Has anyone seen this type of thing happen before on young children?

The reading fluency measure is the one difference. That is a timed test of reading sentences and answering questions. Perfectionism or just thoughtfulness or being tired or any thing could throw it off. It also depends on baseline knowledge external to the test and not contained as a pure skill test. I'd guess enough of the questions take a small bit more thought from the highly gifted thinker, because yes/no can get to be quite ambiguous when you look at things in a bigger light.

I am not 100% sure re how the test is administered at 4 yrs, but fwiw when my children have taken it at slightly older ages (7-8 yrs) they were required to answer the fluency questions using handwriting. I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of a timed test + having to use motor response wouldn't possibly impact the fluency score for a 4 year old.

polarbear

I hear you both about the reading fluency, and for sure her age was reflected in her score. However, her fluency score was 8 points higher then her Broad score.

I am wondering at this point if there is something wonky with the calculation, it just doesn't seem to make logical sense I am trusting by nature but logic says to me that there is a flaw and I don't know if is test driven (maybe because of DD's age) or if it is user error (and how that would even happen.) Or...maybe I should just let this go and not try to understand

Seeing the scores, yea, then I'd vote for wonky with it being lower than all three scores.

I have a few more subtests on my report like word attack, reading vocabulary that go into two separate areas of basic reading skills and reading comprehension. Are you sure you have all the subtests?

There's a standard set of subtests and an extended set. Word attack and reading vocabulary are part of the extended set.

QXP - I have a few more as well, but passage comp is the lowest in the set.

We are seeing the tester tomorrow again. Anyone have any suggestions on how I may suggest to "fix" a wonky score? The computer program that calculates scores seems like a big black box to me so I don't even know where to begin to troubleshoot the wonky calculation. The tester does agree the score seems off, but other then checking her raw numbers she didn't seem to have any other suggestions or thoughts. A simple "I've never seen this before" was about it. I don't want to offend her because she has been doing this a while and is far more of an expert then little ole' me

The only other thought I have is that the norming sample on Broad Reading test subsets didn't have enough in the norming sample to properly calculate broad reading based on DD's age.

Norming seems like a good hypothesis, or a bug in the results data.

If I was a tester trying to detect such an issue, I would plug the same values in for 1 year older and see what comes out.

TNC-I was wondering if you ever got an explanation for the wonky score. I just started a thread about my DS6's Broad Reading score that looks wonky as well. If you could shed any light on the matter I would greatly appreciate it!