Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment please weigh in, didn't pass OLSAT but tested HG?

There are quite a few kids I know at our school who passed the OLSAT, and some of them go on to pass the IQ test for Highly Gifted. However, I am trying to determine if a child didn't pass the OLSAT how likely was it that they went on to pass the HG IQ test through the school system?

Both my children tested HG with a private tester, but both did not pass the school administered OLSAT. I know that the OLSAT does not always ID HG kids, so I am just wondering for those that went through the school district, please tell me if your child didn't pass the OLSAT but did pass the IQ test for HG through your school district. I'm just curious.

I've requested my DS10 be retested because I know he is HG, but I just need to hear some positive outcomes right now I guess….

One of my twins did not pass the screening test given by the school when he was in Kindergarten but was found to be HG when they administered the IQ test. (They administered the IQ test anyway because he did very well on one section of the test, and he was obviously "advanced" for kindergarten (reading at 4th grade level, doing multiplication).

Thanks momoftwins

My twins are both PG and neither got the 99% required on the COGAT (achievement test)administered by our district.

We had a similar experience in our school district. DS9 was not accepted into G/T programming based on OLSAT but was accepted after administration of the WISC-IV. So I do think its possible to test HG without passing the OLSAT.

I will note one surprise we encountered from the additional testing. One assessment showed a distinct nonverbal strength, the other showed a definite verbal strength. I was hoping for one test that captured all his abilities accurately (by my definition anyway) but that has been elusive. And it can create a little trouble in advocating for him when the school makes placement decisions based on one test vs. the other.

Best of luck to you!

High IQ does not equal good at tests and good at tests does not equal high IQ (well not 99.9 percentile high anyway).

As a side note you don't pass or fail such tests.

Ds8 would have the same problem if there were giftprogrammes here. He gets into tge extension stuff this year because it is about the top 10% but last year he missed out because it was a 2 from each class deal and there were 3 gifted kids in his class with the other two having much stronger writing and verbal skills.

There is a body of research that has found that the OLSAT is only moderately correlated to the WISC.

About half-way down this page is a small pilot study that suggests that this finding continues to be the case for the OLSAT-8 and WISC-IV:

https://www.ucmo.edu/osp/reports.cfm

Previous research on the OLSAT-6 and WISC-III:

http://jpa.sagepub.com/content/19/3/239.short
http://cjs.sagepub.com/content/11/2/120.short (this one specifically about GT identification)

The same phenomenon is common enough with other group aptitude tests that the publisher of the CogAT actually released a consumer info sheet on it for the CogAT-6:

http://www.riverpub.com/products/group/cogat6/pdfs/newsletters/CS_vol1_summer04.pdf

Interestingly, this happened with both of my children. My DD8's 2nd grade teacher recommended that she be evaluated for gifted, so she had completed the school's full evaluation (which uses WISC-IV, but not the FSIQ...grrr) and was determined to qualify for the gifted program. She didn't take the OLSAT until the end of 2nd grade and would have just slightly missed the cutoff for further evaluation. My DS13 took th OLSAT and the end of 2ng grade, and although I don't have his scores, I know he didn't make the cutoff because he wasn't further evaluated until the end of 3rd grade when his 3rd grade teacher didn't understand why he wasn't in the gifted program and recommended that he be evaluated, and he qualified. Because our school doesn't do the FSIQ, I can't say that they are highly gifted, and I'm certain that neither is PG, but they are both gifted.