Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Newbie.4.5 yrs old Woodcock Johnson 3 Achievement

Hi! I'm new here with a 4.5 year old boy who has been reading with comprehension, doing crazy math and science and started writing relevant things then as well without me teaching him how to even print letters, all starting at age two and even beforehand. His memory is freakish and memorized 50 digits of Pi in a couple days, learned to count to 20+ in Latin and other languages in a day etc. He's doing some math at 4th and 5th grade level for a while and keeps going and generally freaks people out wherever we go. Nothing new to anyone here I'm certain, but just an intro!

He's in a 2e preschool and they gave him the Woodcock and mentioned something about if he went to Kindergarten, they would need to differentiate and start at fifth grade level with him (which I highly doubt they would actually do). They didn't seem to be joking about his abilities being that high. Can someone help me figure out what this all means? The tester said she's never seen someone score so high and that she had so much fun giving it to him. He did a lot in his head with ease and she gave him stuff she wasn't supposed to as he wasn't old enough yet but she couldn't help herself, so these scores are even with the higher level material. She didn't give me percentiles as I've seen some people post so I'm curious about that as well. I also don't understand what the very last cluster of scores mean. I'm not surprised that his writing is lower as he can write but his fine motor is delayed so it's quite hard to read if you're not used to his handwriting. Can anyone help? I have no idea what to do with him as far as schooling but that's another topic! TIA!

Letter-Word Identification: 162
Passage Comprehension: 130
Brief Reading Cluster: 167

Calculation: 140
Applied Problems: 154
Brief Math Cluster: 156

Spelling: 114
Writing Samples: 123
Brief Writing Cluster: 119

Academic Skills: 148
Academic Applications: 145
Brief Achievement: 149

Welcome, jenjen!

I am no expert, but DS5 also took the WJ-III Ach. around the same age. Those are very strong scores, and nice and even between math and reading! I don't know that I'd worry too much about his writing at this age - DS's tester did not even administer writing because he was so young.

Did the tester give you "broad scores" (I think they need to do the math and reading "fluency" subtests to calculate those)?

DS took the WJ a year ago now and his reading was higher, but his math was lower (to be fair, I did not expose him to much math until this past year, and my guess is that DS's scores would be MUCH higher today). DS is attending public kindergarten and there is NOT a great deal of challenge for him (and I doubt there would be much for your DS either, without modifications). Still, the program is half-day so we do work a bit at his level at home (we do our own "homework" at his level since he hasn't needed to practice letter sounds, counting or sight words). I also give DS's teacher some credit, because she has tried to add some "challenge activities" for DS this year at school. In my experience, whichever school your DS winds up at, the individual TEACHER can make a HUGE difference. A flexible teacher that is willing to add differentiation when needed can REALLY help a bright child make progress.

Do you have gifted schools in your area? He may qualify for those. Does your local school have a gifted program? Unfortunately, many of those programs do not start until 3rd grade or so, though (we just went though this with DD8). This may help add some challenge for him, too. I think, as parents, we too need to be flexible and willing to change programming, or even schools, if something that was working is no longer suitable for our child.

Letter-Word Identification: 162
Passage Comprehension: 130
Brief Reading Cluster: 167

Calculation: 140
Applied Problems: 154
Brief Math Cluster: 156

Spelling: 114
Writing Samples: 123
Brief Writing Cluster: 119

Academic Skills: 148
Academic Applications: 145
Brief Achievement: 149 [/quote]

Percentiles: she probably didn't give you percentiles because most of these scores (everything above 134) are above the 99th %ile, so they would (amazingly!) not be particularly meaningful. In that range, the standard scores actually spread performance out better than percentiles. FYI, his top score is at a percentile of 99.99, or one in 10,000!

And if anyone really has an obsession with the normal curve, there's a free iPhone app from PAR (publishers of assessment instruments) that has a normal curve and conversion function for standard scores, z scores, scaled scores, percentiles, and T scores). Search "PAR assessment toolkit" in the app store. You can enter any one of those types of scores, and see the equivalent in all the other types of norm-referenced scores. It also has a nice stopwatch, which is mostly what I use it for when testing.

The last cluster: Academic Skills is a composite derived from the basic skills subtest of each academic area: letter-word ID, calculations, and spelling. Similarly, Academic Applications is a composite derived from the reasoning subtest of each area: passage comprehension, applied problems, and
writing samples. The cluster that is missing here is Academic Fluency, which would include reading fluency, math fluency, and writing fluency subtests.

Broad scores: Yes, those require the fluency measures, which she probably didn't administer because of his age and also because, at this age, they will become measures of fine-motor speed, rather than true fluency.

My DS was given the WJ achievement at age 6 and has developmental coordination disorder, is in therapy, and is on an IEP for being "physically impaired". He scored 97th percentile for math fluency for what it's worth. All of the "fluency" scores (incl reading fluency which also involves writing I believe) were his lowest scores. Same with my DD who has slow processing speed and writing issues.
DS's broad math score was 155 but the district refused to accelerate him even one grade for math. they claimed there are too many gaps. I did not see the WJ administered but have a feeling it doesn't measure the "standards" that kids are expected to know, like knowing how to identify something as a rhombus or quadrilateral. He scored around 96th or 98th percentile, for a national percentile, on the computerized math test (similar to MAP in that it tests above-level, but it was a different test). So there is obviously a difference in what the WJ is measuring and other tests of math achievement. His teacher has been working with him to close the gaps so it should be interesting to see how much his score goes up when he takes it again in a couple weeks.

I think his WJ broad reading score was pretty identical to what the computerized testing showed, around 97th percentile or 2-3 grade levels ahead. But for math there was a big difference. We were pretty much letting DS explore whatever math topics interested him rather than doing any sort of curriculum and so he was up to a fifth grade level for things like multiplication and division, but didn't know other basic things like how to measure with a ruler or use a protractor.

Don't know if this helps. Maybe aeh can weigh in on what the WJ is measuring and how it is different than other curriculum based measurements and if the WJ is really a good tool for figuring out whether a kid should accelerate and how much. Our district didn't care at all about DS's WJ test scores (even though they are the ones who gave the test to him as part of his IEP eval, so it's rather ironic).

The WJ, like the WIAT and the KTEA, which are the other two most-commonly administered norm-referenced measures of achievement, is intended to sample skills in order to make a comparison against the norm group (presumed to be representative of our population by age). It is not comprehensive, nor is it necessarily aligned with any given school system's curriculum.

With reading, the foundational skills have usually been acquired by the third grade level. Beyond that, it's essentially refinement of the same skill set, through acquisition of vocabulary, increasing fluency, and applying overall cognition to comprehension. There isn't really any specific content in ELA, up until high school, when an expectation of a common literary experience begins to come into play. This is why there is often a better match between reading scores on the WJ, et al, and on curriculum-based measures.

Mathematics is a bit different. After mastery of basic arithmetic, there are numerous qualitatively different skills, for which sequence matters. Many of them also involve specialized math vocabulary that most children won't have exposure to in their non-instructional environment. How this often plays out for a gifted youngster is that the math reasoning (e.g., applied problems on the WJ, math problem solving on the WIAT)score is quite a bit stronger than the calculation score, because one can think one's way through real-life math situations without knowing the formal notation or vocabulary of math, but it is more challenging to compute problems when you don't know what the symbols mean because no one has told you the conventions.

In addition, our educational system's expectations for elementary math are pitifully low, so a child who has mastered through long-division and multi-digit multiplication by first or second grade age (not that uncommon an occurrence among kids gifted in math) will blow any computation test out of the water, because their age-peers are still working on addition and subtraction without regrouping, and the skills they have mastered are not part of the curriculum until fourth and fifth grade. These high scores do not actually mean that the child is ready for the grade-equivalents reported, both because of the spurious nature of grade-equivalents (but that's another story, for another thread), and because there are other math skills in the curriculum, that are not being sampled by the test.

For a more comprehensive math assessment, I would suggest the KeyMath-3DA, which can actually give you some instructionally-relevant data about specific skills, while retaining the psychometric robustness of being a nationally norm-referenced standardized test. I've mentioned elsewhere that the best way to decide on grade/subject acceleration in a particular setting is to use curriculum-based assessment, meaning formative (progress monitoring) and summative (standards or outcome) assessments drawn from the actual curriculum being used in the proposed placement. It's even better if there are local norms for the assessment. This helps to correct for the communities where everyone is above average.

Thanks for the explanation. Sometime you will hopefully give us that other info about the grade equivalents because I am very curious.

Someone pulled DS out of class when we asked about acceleration and gave him about 5 tests in a row that went above grade level that are normally given to the kids at the end of each unit. They were the tests normally used with that curriculum. So there were some questions on there that were very specific to the curriculum, for instance "draw a math mountain showing such-and-such equation." Since DS had never been exposed to that lesson, he got those questions wrong--had no idea what they were looking for although probably understood the actual concepts just fine. The teacher also said she gave him a CBM math assessment for second grade (at the beginning of first grade), because I had asked her to do above level testing for math (this was before the other teacher did the computerized test), and he scored 89 percent (questions correct). But the district dismissed this and said that it's not "rigorous" enough. Any input on that?

Oy. Honestly, it sounds to me like they were looking for reasons not to accelerate him. But lets play devil's advocate. "Lack of rigor" in the CBM-math may be because some of these probes are just that--probes to check on progress in a skill area based on a few key indicators. They can be subject to the same lack of comprehensiveness (is that a word?) that the WJ-type achievement tests have. Also, some tests that are called CBM aren't really based on the curriculum. The legitimate curriculum-based measure in this case would be the series of benchmark assessments pulled directly from the classroom curriculum. The difficulty with that is that it is unlikely to have good national norms. But if what you want to know is how likely a child is to be successful in this particular setting, using this particular curriculum, that is where you will find the information. My preference in your son's case would have been to use the benchmark assessments to pinpoint specific gaps, fill them, and then grade accelerate him to whatever point in the curriculum that he was consistently below 80% success on benchmarks (as a means of locating his zone of proximal development). I actually did this with #1 in the third grade, when my math-loving offspring started to complain that math was boring. (Of course, I had been asking the school to do it since first grade, but didn't get through to anyone until we reached this particular teacher.) The teacher allowed #1 to take a pretest for each unit, and skip any chapter that was 80+% accurate. This ensured that every aspect of the curriculum was touched on somewhere, but no more than one day had to be wasted on already-mastered skills. Perhaps that actually is the school's plan...but if it is, it would be nice if they let you in on it!

All right: A little bit about age/grade equivalents:

For nearly all norm-referenced standardized tests, both cognitive and achievement, the grade and age equivalents reported are derived not by determining what material constitutes the mastery level or instructional range of the average students of that grade or age, but by linear regression, using the test score at the 50th %ile for the listed age/grade. Now this sounds at face value like it would be a legitimate measure of age/grade equivalency--i.e., something you could use to determine appropriate subject/grade placement. But it's not! This is because what you actually learn about a student who's listed grade equivalence is 5.7 is not that they are appropriately placed in a fifth-grade-seventh-month curriculum, but that they got the same score on the test (which doesn't necessarily cover fifth-grade material) that the statistically-average fifth-grade-seventh-month student did. For example, on a measure of addition fluency, a fifth-grade student often can complete items much more quickly than a second-grade student, but the degree of math difficulty is the same for both of them. So a grade equivalent of 5.7 is not qualitatively much different from a GE of 2.7, nor does obtaining a GE of 5.7 on such a measure mean that an individual is capable of doing late fifth-grade work.

As with the above example, many skills have variable slopes across age/grade. In early elementary, the decoding skills of the average student are on a very steep curve, so the curve is more compressed. On the other hand, most people have mastered basic decoding skills, including the exceptions, by the time they have reached middle school. So the difference between a GE in middle school and high school on a word-level reading task is just a few points--not that meaningful statistically, but dramatically different in apparent grade-level.

This is why program criteria are usually based on standard scores or percentiles (as the more statistically robust cutoff scores), rather than GE/AE, and why determining grade/subject placement should be tied to the criteria that students normally are required to meet to demonstrate mastery of the curriculum.

I think there were a lot of reasons they gave those assessments and they were not "trying" to accelerate him--quite the opposite. The only reason the principal gave him assessments or met with us about it is because I pointed out the district has an acceleration policy and he/the school weren't following it. The principal told another family whose DD is even more advanced in math that their child was "too old" to accelerate (she's in third grade!) and it was unsafe for her to walk down the hallway to another class. Obviously excuses, but it shows how opposed he is to the concept. He was going to do his best to make sure it didn't work out for us/DS.
They also made him do all of the assessments in one sitting, so about 10 pages of written work all at once. Never mind the fact that he has an IEP for handwriting among other things and was 6 years old. Considering how hostile they were I didn't even want to push it. I took him out of the school and transferred him and he luckily got a fabulous teacher who is giving him much harder work than anything that he would have gotten being accelerated. Not sure if I will pursue it again in the future. As long as he has a teacher who gives him the right level work and he continues to learn, I don't really care.

Thanks for the info on the WJ grade norms. They put DS at 4th-5th grade for math (5th for calculation and 4th for applied math) and I knew that wouldn't be appropriate. I was just aiming for second.

Some things just don't change much, do they. That is just what my mother went through forty years ago, trying to get the (high performing) school to meet the needs of my PG brother. She ended up changing his school, then pulling out of the district altogether, and finally radically accelerating him into college full time at age 10. Of course, IEPs were in their infancy then, and there were no GIEPs.

You are very welcome. I'm always happy to discuss test esoterica.