Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment High Working Memory on WISC

I am new to this discussion forum, and am in the process of preparing a GT appeal for my 6 year old daughter. She was tested at her school using the COGAT, and her score on nonverbal was the only score above 130 (131). The other two scores fell in the high average and superior range. We decided to have private testing done, and she took the WISC on Friday. My daughter was not feeling her best that day, but she is often not feeling her best due to allergies. Her FSIQ came back as a 129. Here is a breakdown of her scores:
VCI: 114
PRI: 115
WMI: 135
PSI: 131

If you break down the scores even further, the thing that dragged down her VCI was her comprehension score which was a 9 (37%)! By comparison, her Similarities and Vocabulary scores were a 14 (91%) and 15 (95%) respectively. Her other area of weakness was in Picture Concetps were she scored a 10 (50%). Her Block design and Matrix reasoning were 13 (84%) and 14 (91%) respectively.

We are meeeting with the pscyhologist on Tuesday to discuss the results and the appeal is due by Friday. My questions is will this testing even help her appeal? I realize that GT identification is more than a test result, and my daughter displays so many characteristics of a GT child. However, she is my second of 4 children and is extremely quite (my first daughter is the opposite...extremely outgoing and engaging with teachers. She was identified as GT at the age of 4). I feel like my child is often overlooked by her teachers as having potential.

Since my post yesterday, I have found some information that indicates a high WM score along with high processing speed may demonstrate giftedness in mathematics. Our school district identifies students as gifted in "language arts/social studies" and "math/science". For my daughters appeal, should I just be appealing in math science based on the scores? I know that her VCI and PRI score should ideally be higher, but I am hoping that the school district will look at the raw data to see that her vocabulary and similarities scores were quite good. Any thoughts on interpreting the data would be much appreciated.

kids with high working memory can be good at math problem solving, but it is also associated with written expression, reading and language comprehension. It really is a measure of how much information you can store and manipulate to solve different tasks. PRI indexes are also associated with mathematical ability. Her full scale IQ is being brought up by her working memory and speed. Her verbal and PRI indexes are above average but not in the superior or gifted range. If you use these scores on appeal, they might not help you.

Do you suspect any 2E issues with your daughter? Do you think there is a reason why her social comprehension would be 3 standard deviations below her vocabulary? Or her picture concepts is 2 SDs below the other two PRI scores? These are things I would ask the tester about when you meet with her.

I'm guessing you've already had your meeting with the psychologist, but in case you haven't, the questions I'd ask are:

1) What order did she give the subtests in? (I'm curious if the two subtests that are relatively low were at the end of testing). If you didn't have a chance to ask this, you can google "Order of WISC subtests" and find out - it's my understanding that they are supposed to be given in the same order each time.

2) What reasons does the psych feel came into play re the lower subtest scores? Did she see other issues? Does she recommend any follow-up testing? Is there anything you can look for in your dd's academic work or life functioning that would show a correlation with lower scores in those areas?

3) Is the subtest scatter statistically significant? There is a certain amount of scatter that is acceptable; above a certain amount composite scores are considered not reliable. I think the statistically significant difference is greater than 1.5 SDs, but I'm not 100% certain of that. If it happens that your dd's scores *are* statistically far enough apart to question the VCI and PRI calculations, then you can certainly use that to explain a possible reason why they aren't higher if you share the scores with the school. It's usually important in advocating, however, that if you have a case of scores that don't make sense or are scattered or don't match achievement scores etc that you also dig into *why* they are what they are. Just stating that you can't trust them or they aren't accurately reflecting ability without that understanding of what's at the root of it doesn't usually gain you anything when advocating, plus it could mean you are missing out on the opportunity to help your child with an issue that's not obvious on the surface.

FWIW, one of my daughters has a considerably higher WM/PSI than VIQ/PRI (VIQ and PRI are "high", just not as high as WM/PSI). My experience having seen her through several years of school now, as she goes into higher grades and more challenging work, is that I believe she needs to be placed where her VIQ/PRI put her, not the WM/PSI. If anything, having her uber-high WM/PSI just makes her impatient and more likely to become frustrated and not want to have to deal with the details of work such as checking spelling etc. It hasn't caused her to have the same need for a rapid pace of learning or depth of discussion that my higher PRI/VIQ ds needs, so I would be hesitant to accelerate her to the same degree or put her in the same pace of classes that ds needs. Hope that makes sense!

It doesn't mean your dd isn't gifted or doesn't need challenging classes, just that I'd be hesitant to make the class placement decision based on WM/PSI without equally high PRI/VIQ. And of course classwork, achievement testing etc are all important too.

Best wishes,

polarbear

I have to say that I've never really noticed scores like that on this forum. Most kids seem to score high on VCI and/or PRI and then lower on working memory and/or processing speed. I have no idea what scores like that mean, but wanted to comment on the working memory part of it. DS scored high average (I think 118) for working memory but his math achievement score was very high on the Woodcock Johnson Achievement (over 99.9th percentile). His perceptual reasoning score was in the 140's. The neuropsych gave him the working memory section twice. Once several months after a traumatic brain injury, an then again about 6 months after that. His WM score went up maybe 5 points the second time but it wasn't a huge difference. So for him at least, there's not much of a correlation between WM and math ability. His teacher is giving him math that's a 3rd-5th grade level (he's in 1st). Maybe WM will play more of a role with higher level math, I don't know.

You could try getting an achievement test like the WIAT or Woodcock Johnson, which might be more helpful in terms of advocating with the school (or maybe not, it just depends on the attitude of the school). If the school has a certain cut-off for the gifted program and the WISC doesn't meet the cut-off, I don't think those scores will help because usually schools would be the most interested in the VCI and PRI scores (assuming they have any understanding of the test), because those are the scores that test reasoning ability, which is the most helpful in terms of doing higher level work.

I am apparently not using the quote function correctly, so my apologies. I've interwoven my responses to polarbear's very thoughtful list of questions below.

1) What order did she give the subtests in? (I'm curious if the two subtests that are relatively low were at the end of testing). If you didn't have a chance to ask this, you can google "Order of WISC subtests" and find out - it's my understanding that they are supposed to be given in the same order each time.

--Comprehension, one of the low scores, is usually the last verbal subtest administered, and is #9 out of the 10 core subtests. Picture Concepts is the second of three perceptual subtests, and is #4 out of 10 overall.

2) What reasons does the psych feel came into play re the lower subtest scores? Did she see other issues? Does she recommend any follow-up testing? Is there anything you can look for in your dd's academic work or life functioning that would show a correlation with lower scores in those areas?

--excellent question, especially looking at social reasoning, analogic thinking, that sort of thing.

3) Is the subtest scatter statistically significant? There is a certain amount of scatter that is acceptable; above a certain amount composite scores are considered not reliable. I think the statistically significant difference is greater than 1.5 SDs, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

--the standard for scatter is a little more complicated than that, and I'd have to check my manual at work for the exact figures, but offhand I'd say it is likely that the VCI is questionable, or at least that the Comprehension subtest is an outlier. When I encounter this kind of divergence, I usually give an additional verbal subtest, such as Information or Word Reasoning, to see if there are any patterns of verbal strength/weakness.

polarbear[/quote]

--as to general thoughts on this profile, assuming it is legit (at this point, a big assumption): I have had one or two students in the past with this profile (it is not that common in my experience as well). Generally, it is better to place these students based on their VCI and PRI, not their WMI and PSI, as the former two Indices have more to do with the kind of higher-level, abstract thinking that G&T programming is supposed to serve, while the latter two are more reflective of the efficiency with which simpler tasks are completed. These children usually have very good rote memory, which allows them to master the basic skills easily, and their high processing speed has them zipping through mastered tasks efficiently. But when we demand abstraction, divergent thinking, concept integration, etc., they often find themselves out of their depth. Historically, I have not recommended this kind of profile, or those who are similar but less extreme, for G&T, mainly because they are prone to being stressed out by the expectations.

This is the kind of profile which is best suited to always being placed in the top group in a differentiated regular classroom. If placed with majority high VCI/PRI children, they may keep up as long as the emphasis is on basic skills (say, through the end of third grade), but will rapidly be left behind as the focus of instruction switches to higher-level problem-solving. Certainly, the profile as is supports being supplemented a bit in the regular classroom. And being given more acknowledgment for her strengths.

Wow, I really do appreciate such thoughtful and comprehensive responses. I do have a question about how her Cogat scores would play into all if this. She did achieve a 131 on the nonverbal portion or the Cogat. Her quantitative score was lower at 120 (last year it was a 124). Her verbal was not even close at 112. So, does having a high nonverbal score on Cogat along with high working memory and processing on wisc show gifted abilities?

I certainly don't want to put her in a classroom setting that will stress her out, and our GT program is very rigorous starting in 3rd grade. My oldest child is pretty textbook GT (high verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal) and so it was easy to have her identified, and she thrives in the program. But I have always felt that my younger daughter was gifted as well, she's just different from her sister. An example would be that by the age of 2.5, she was able to put together 100 piece puzzles. Like her older sister, she started talking at 9 mos, but her vocabulary was not as robust. She's also very very quiet, and extremely sensitive.

As far as her classroom performance goes, she does well in all areas, and does demonstrate strong math performance (she currently has an overall grade of 99). She does struggle with reading comprehension so that is not surprising that the test revealed that. However, I was surprised at how bad that score was. It does make me question if she has a learning disability or just major asynchronous development on the verbal side.

Drawing from my own experience, I know that I did not initially qualify for GT the first time I was tested. But, I was retested a year or two later and met the requirements. Because her scores are so crazy I feel like something is "off" and some of her abilities will develop further. In the meantime, I am going to appeal on her behalf for math/science and we'll see what happens. If I have time I will post something I found on working memory being linked to strong math abilities. Thanks again to everyone for the responses!

I wanted to post the link to the paper that I found correlating memory and speed of processing with giftedness in mathematics. Thank you again for all of the advice and food for thought!

http://cerme8.metu.edu.tr/wgpapers/WG7/WG7_Leikin.pdf

Interesting article. I don't think the WISC tests for visual spatial memory that well. The closest test might be block design. The digit span and letter-number sequence requires remembering digits/letters numbers said orally (strangely DS did much better on letter/number sequence than on digit span).
DS did take a Test of Visual Perceptual Skills because he had a brain injury and his eyes were looking in different directions. He hit the ceiling on the subtests for visual memory and visual spatial ability. So his visual memory appears to be a lot better than auditory.

Very interesting - your DD's highest area was my DD8's lowest area!

I have no idea whether high WMI is actually associated with giftedness in math skills, but I can relate my DD8's experience with a relatively LOWER area in WMI, FWIW (WMI is "high average," but still AVERAGE):

Math has NOT been an "area of confidence" for her up until this year, but she tests very well in math (ranging between 98-high 99% on standardized tests) and has always been in the highest math group since differentiation in math started. "Quantitative" was her lowest area on the CoGAT, although it was still quite high. DD's recent EXPLORE math score was above the DYS criteria, but only her 3rd highest score. Also, DD has been making remarkable progress in math, and this year scored a VERY HIGH 99% on MAP math (with a RIT very high several grades up).

So while high WMI might indicate mathematical giftedness, lower relative WMI does not seem to indicate, at least for my DD, actual mathematical weakness.

It sounds like your DD had some subtests that were very high and that her VCI and PRI were each dragged down by a single weaker subtest. I wonder if something just did not "go right" for her on that day, for those subtests. I wonder if when eventually retested down the road, she might actually test much higher. I would also look to the other data you have on your DD to see a more complete picture of her strengths - because she clearly has many!