Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Concerned about low processing score

There is research that finds that children with environmental allergies display decreased attention during allergic reaction episodes. There are also drags on attention/executive function that occur as side effects of medications for allergies and asthma. For most children, the net effect of med side effects is less severe than that of going unmedicated, especially on a bad day.

What about my suggestion. I don't think it's on your list.

This is indeed intriguing as my ds has several allergies as well and has been treated on an off for years with medication that has affected his mood. I've often wondered if it has affected his cognitive functioning as well.

I worked with 1st through 3rd graders and used a timer for reading fluency pretty much all of the time. Many of them seemed to have no grasp of the importance of speed. They would stop in the middle of a sentence, go back and start the sentence over, yawn in the middle of it, stop and make random comments, etc. It was frustrating because I was charting their progress and once they hit a certain target with their speed, and hit it 3 weeks in a row, they could be exited from the program. I didn't want to pressure them to "read as fast as you can" because that made some of them anxious and they actually slowed down. Personally I think "coding" is just a really dumb test. Too many kids who score brilliantly in everything else get average or low coding scores and it doesn't add up, or seem to mean much of anything about their actual intelligence (or what I would consider intelligence at any rate). I would buy into speed as a factor of intelligence in other sorts of tasks, but coding seems to depend way too much on other factors. Why not just have the person respond verbally, for instance hold up pictures of objects that they already know (like cat, dog, baby, etc), and time their response? Why is "motor speed" even a component of IQ? If it is, then people with disabilities like dyspraxia should have lower IQs as a general principle. All of the subtests should show roughly the same score (give or take), otherwise it seems like it's not really telling us much of anything about their overall ability.

Thank you blackcat! That relaxes me a tad! lol. My husband and I are pretty set on getting a full workup anyways, because there may be *something* there, what it is, I don't know. Maybe I'm in denial, but since I homeschool him, I feel like I'd pick up on if he had some sort of major deficit that caused him to perform worse than 99% of the 7 year olds that have taken that test. I am worried that I sound like I'm in denial, I promise I'm not, we are going to look into this. The tester really made it sound like she could tell by the way he was acting that he just did not understand he was supposed to go fast. I am also confused as to why this isn't apparent in his WJ scores? Are the fluency portions not timed? He did do the worst in writing fluency, but that was still 51%, not 1%. Perhaps I am missing something, I admittedly have not looked into what makes up these tests.

Surprisingly, there is some relationship between motor speed and intelligence. Jensen is very hot on reaction time as a measure of "g". I don't think it's as good a measure (.51, the lowest on the WISC-IV, vs .83 for vocabulary, the highest) as, say verbal reasoning, but it has its value for many kids. Just not a good reflection of intelligence for some.

I just read on the new wisc coding is less heavily weighted. Not that it matters for my ds, because we already know his GAI without it, but I thought it was interesting.

I still think there has to be a better method of measuring that. Some people are fast, sloppy writers, and others are slow and careful. I wouldn't say that fast and sloppy equals "brighter". DD is very fast with other fine motor skills, like making those rainbow loom things, weaving, braiding hair, playing piano, etc. Those are all things where the "slow processing" isn't apparent. Ask her what 9X6 + 8X7 is though and it will be more obvious. So there are big differences between motor speed with her depending on the task. Writing is really the only area where I see a deficit in terms of fine motor.

I didn't know this. What is interesting to me is that this would seem to be more evidence that issues with the immune system affect the nervous system and the brain. (And yet, mainstream medicine seems uninterested in the "side effects" of both the allergy, i.e. immune issue, and the treatment, and looking more toward root causes in cases of attention issues and so forth.)

I've been reading lately about certain immune problems that actually cause handwriting issues, possibly just the sort of motor issues indicated by a low Coding score. (Things that make you go "hmm...")

Yes, processing speed and working memory are both less-heavily weighted into the FSIQ on the WISC-V (2 out of the 7 subtests) than they were on the WISC-IV (4 out of the 10 subtests). Partly to make room for the division of PRI into VSI and FRI (trying to keep the number of core subtests down--7, reduced from 10), and partly because they really don't load as heavily onto general intelligence.

The index scores also will not translate as neatly into the FSIQ, as there will be an additional three subtests necessary to derive the five primary index scores (one more for each of the VSI, WMI, and PSI).