Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Additional Testing? Psych wants to redo IQ test?

My children (1st grade) were given IQ tests last year by their school, along with 2 brief assessment tests. We would like to have more achievement-type tests done to find out additional information that might be helpful for school, but the psychologist I spoke with wants to repeat the IQ test before doing any additional testing. Is this typical? We were hoping not to have repeat the IQ tests at this point, as it has only been slightly longer than a year. Doing the whole battery is quite expensive (especially times two!), so we would prefer not to do the whole thing again this soon if possible.

I was just wondering if this typical, or if I should keep looking for someone who will be willing to do only the achievement tests.

Thanks!

Find another psychologist and just do the Ach tests.

What reason was given?

He said he would feel more confident in his recommendations if he administered an IQ test and could see all of the results. I am willing to share the report we had with him, which includes the subtest scores, but he wants his own test results if he is going to be making educational recommendations. I suppose he actually wants to know the type of questions that they miss. He is not willing to just administer the achievement tests.

I am going to try to find someone else, as we really don't want to spend the extra time or money to repeat the IQ tests this year.

If you need levels for school, can you get school to administer tests? I'd look closely at the "why" and adjust the process accordingly.

Unless there's something major that's changed in the intervening time, or a reason to mistrust the old scores, I would think you don't need new IQ scores.

The school won't administer new tests, or more tests - they say what they have is enough. They also don't seem to be very interested in finding out present levels of performance. But at the same time, they will only write the GIEP based on the testing they have from kindergarten, which isn't much. I was hoping to get some new levels to use as a basis for discussion.

There isn't any reason to mistrust the old scores. The test was done 13 months ago by a certified school psychologist who works for the school district. We have a copy of the report.

Doesn't the school use MAP testing or such?

If not, it looks like there are homeschool resources that allow you to test on the MAP online fairly inexpensively:

http://acces-inc.com/acces/files/Registration%20Homeschoolers.pdf

In general, a psychologist may want to become familiar with the child through individual testing and observation of that child's testing experience relative to the conditions under which the test was administered, and may also wish to avoid a repeat of exposure to the same test instrument.

True (test behavior). But avoiding overexposure would require giving a different measure of cognitive ability. Some examiners also want to compare cognitive and academic ability statistically, which you can only do with some validity if they are administered within six months of each other.

I would echo the comment about using data from any curriculum-based assessment, progress monitoring probes, etc. that the school may already be collecting. The primary flaw with these is that they usually target grade-level skills (as they are mainly intended to track the growth of below-grade level skills), so they tend to have rather low ceilings, unless out-of-grade-level probes are administered. The advantage is that they generally are better matched to the curriculum of the school, which can be useful when you are discussing grade/subject acceleration.

Two of my kids had neuropsych testing, which is a full battery and IQ must be included. An IQ test is not an IQ test is not an IQ test. If they used a different one that the psych prefers, he likely doesn't trust it.