Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Which tests to ask for?

Hi All,

I've been reading here for a while, but testing issues pretty much still confound me. My basic question here is what tests to request for my second grade daughter.

Here is our situation. My older PG daughter had such a bad experience in the public school that we have pulled her out, a decision we have no second thoughts about. In the process, I got to know the school psychologist a bit. It seemed pretty clear to me that she is smart but a servant to the school's interests and not to the children's, and that she takes shortcuts that are not necessarily helpful to families. In particular, she failed to offer us anything in writing the first time she tested my child several years ago, pulled my older child for an IQ test in the middle of a meltdown the second time, provided percentile results without numerical scores or indications of which tests she used (until I asked), and saw only my daughter's emotional problems and not the significance of her intellectuals giftedness in contributing to her school difficulties.

Now here we are in need of help with our younger daughter, whose gifts are quite different from her sister and has not been tested yet. She continues to attend the public school. Our younger daughter's strongest area is art, and she inclines toward math. She is introverted and quiet, and generally is cooperative in school. But she has shut down with homework this year in a way that is worrying us. My husband and I both wonder if the homework strike is not her own way of expressing the "rage of the gifted child." We would like not make the mistakes we made with our older daughter, letting her emotional problems go for such a long time.

So we think it is time to ask the school psychologist to administer an IQ test. But because I do not trust the psychologist completely, I would like to give her some instructions. Left to her own devices, I think that she will probably just do a general test that will not capture my daughter's strengths in the visual realm--her goal will be to see whether she qualifies for the (nonexistent) GT program or not, not to provide a total look at my child.

What tests should we ask her to administer? What should I ask her to put in writing.

Could you do the testing privately, so that you could work with a tester who would be responsive to your concerns (and who would use a test with sufficiently high ceilings, etc.)? One potential problem with school testing is that if they are simply looking to see if your child simply crosses some arbitrary "gifted threshold," you might not get a full test or a test with adequately high ceilings (or they might not feel the need to continue the test once they've reached their "magic number"). Also, if the test is incomplete, your DD might not be able to take the same test version for a year or two (if you later decide to have it done privately), and you could be more limited in your testing options.

A private tester is an option, but expensive for our family. I was hoping to keep her in reserve for a while, especially since my daughter will probably also recognize that going to see this particular psychologist is the first step toward putting her into the local gifted school--which is something she really does not want at this moment.

I was thinking of using the free testing at the public school as a way of getting a baseline from which to figure out our next steps.

In some cases, the school's testing is necessary (for their program, for instance) or very helpful (some schools actually properly administer full tests! ).

We've done testing both ways. The school's test was needed for their program, but was only a "partial test," with a low ceiling. We only received the "final score" in the mail - no further explanation, no analysis, no breakdown, etc. The private testing had higher ceilings, complete explanations, descriptions, and a chance to ask the tester questions and hear how our DC answered the questions - MUCH more informative. After learning from my experiences with the school testing with my older DC, I chose to do things differently with the younger DC (did the testing earlier, with a private tester).