Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Help interpreting scattered WPPSI-IV results

DS5 was assessed by the school psychologist using WPPSI-IV and WIAT-III. He is exceptionally advanced academically and on an IEP for motor skills. We requested the assessment because we had noticed that he was much slower at some visual spatial tasks than his twin sister (e.g. solving mazes) and he was struggling with certain tasks and transitions.

His WPPSI subtest scores ranged from 9 to 19 but the psychologist shrugged these off as �average = fine� to �very superior�, without providing any insight into why his profile might be so spiky. I suspect that she did not make any accommodations or substitute subtests due to his motor disability, but am questioning whether motor issues fully explain the spread in his numbers. On the WIAT-III he reached the ceiling for his age on both Early Reading Skills (145) and Math Problem Solving (160).

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I would like to have a better understanding of what these subtest scores are truly telling us. My biggest concern is that he may have a disability that is being masked by his strengths. While the VCI score makes sense relative to observed ability, I wonder how his math / abstract reasoning skills were reflected in the WPPSI and what may have caused so much spread in his scores. His WIAT-III score seems to accurately reflect his observed math ability; apparently he went far beyond the questions required to reach the ceiling for his age. Processing speed is another question mark: he does mental arithmetic far faster than I can, and according to the psychologist he solved all the WIAT-III problems using mental math.

Incidentally, I am not certain that the psychologist wrote the correct index scores. There were some obvious typos in the percentiles and confidence intervals in her report. Based on the scaled subtest scores I wonder whether Fluid Reasoning should score lower than Visual Spatial.

Thanks for any insights.

As a footnote: I am new to the board, so have tried to be succinct. Happy to provide further detail or to answer questions. In case it's helpful to have more concrete information, the excerpt below from the psychologist's report makes me wonder why fluid reasoning did not have a higher score. It's probably worth noting that his math is primarily self-taught / learned by reading books on his own, and comes to him as naturally as breathing. Though I have a math background even I am often surprised by the math that he has mastered or intuitively understands.

"He was able to complete advanced problems including finding percentages, division and algebraic equations. He solved all the items on the Math Problem Solving test using mental math, including an item that required him to find the average of four numbers. He could order fractions in order, find perimeter, solve word problems, read graphs, find place value, measure objects and tell time. He solved a geometry problem that required him to rotate a triangle 90 degrees."

Much appreciation for any insights or advice.

The SP is not allowed to make any accommodations, as they would invalidate test scores (tests like this are the documentary basis of many accommodations).

Your DS already has an IEP for motor skills, so it would not be surprising if the lower scores in the PSI were simply reflective of fine motor delays. Those same motor delays would affect the VSI tasks, as both of them are motor-involved, and include bonus points for speed (which, given his PSI, he probably didn't get many of, even if his designs were accurate). Curiously, he did better on the (mildly) motor-involved WMI task (Zoo Locations; involves placing a card, but isn't timed) than he did on the motor-free task (Picture Memory). The former is a visual-spatial memory task, and the latter a sequential memory task, for which either visual or verbal memory (though more visual, for most children) strategies can be used.

This answers your question about his mental processing speed vs the PSI: this is a fine-motor speed task, so a lower score may be due to mental processing speed, fine-motor speed, or something else (there is a long list of options, but since you've already documented fast mental processing speed and motor delays, it makes sense that the issue here is fine-motor speed).

Even the GAI would probably not be the best representation of ability, as it would be affected by the (probably) lowered scores in the VS cluster. And some of the FRI subtests aren't that high, either. I'd be quite interested to know if the evaluator probed for/commented on the rationale behind the responses he gave on Picture Concepts, as I've observed divergent thinkers scoring low on this one in particular, because they identified plausible, but non-standard, conceptual categories. Thereby receiving no credit for those items.

I would agree that some of your numbers are odd (assuming these are US norms, and that he was assessed at age 5). The top score obtainable for a five-year-old on the WIAT-III ERS is 141 (and that's for a very young 5 yo). The max score for a mid-5 yo is 135, and for an old 5 yo, 130. A late 4 yo, OTOH, could max out at 145. That being said, the subtest scaled scores do not preclude the FRI and VSI being accurate numbers, as index scores are not straight averages.

The relatively low ceilings, BTW, are because the most difficult item on ERS requires matching two words to a picture. Any child who can read at all should be able to max out the subtest.

It is not entirely clear how much of his math ability is not documented on the WPPSI, as his FRI and VSI (even with some likely score depression) are both plenty strong. His WIAT MPS score is very high, but also may reflect the extremely low expectations for PK and K level students. To score a 160, a 5 yo needs to be able to do simple arithmetic, and possibly some simple fractions, basic money, time, and calendar. Truly abstract mathematical thinking is so rare that it is not even assessed at this age. The kind of math skills he currently displays still have a strong language component to them (in the sense of the elementary vocabulary of math), which actually lines up fairly well with his exceptionally strong language reasoning.

To sum up: as to whether he has a disability being masked by his strengths, I believe he already has an identified disability, which generally appears to line up with the lower(ed) areas on this assessment. As to inconsistencies with his IRL academic presentation, I don't really see gross ones. And he is, of course, still very young, at an age when testing results can be easily affected by many small-child related factors. Generally, cognitive assessment numbers are not considered to be stable until around age 8 or 9.

aeh thank you for your response and insights. It's reassuring to know that most of the lowered scores might be explained by a simple motor delay. The wide spread in his subtest scores certainly made me wonder whether I should be acutely concerned.

My impression was that there might be subtest substitution in the case of pre-identified disabilities(?) I am not sure whether this applies only to tests for older children, e.g. the WISC-IV/V.

Interesting. I have no idea as to why he would do worse on a sequential memory task.

Thanks.

The evaluator did not comment on his answers to the Picture Concepts; my impression is that she does not often work with gifted children and would not have been likely to probe for divergent thinking. She did comment that in the Similarities (VC) subtest he had only one incorrect answer. I found it odd that he would perform so well in this subtest but not the Picture Concepts subtest.

He was assessed a week before his fifth birthday. According to the school specialist at the debrief meeting, at the time he was reading at a 4th / 5th grade level. It sounds as though this subtest is not particularly illuminating due to its low ceiling.

He is phenomenally advanced in math, and while strongest in number theory (arithmetic) has a rapid and intuitive grasp of the abstract relationships underlying more advanced math. I have a math background and was in an undergrad cohort where every person who chose to sit the Putnam examination placed in the top 100. This child may be the most natural mathematical thinker I have met. It�s not clear if there's a moderation delay or my earlier comment will post, but the evaluator�s comment on his WIAT-III MPS was
At home he is self-taught and reads math books for fun, calculates in different number bases (e.g. binary, base 5, base 7, base 8) and hunts down ever-larger primes and squares. Methodically working his way up through squares both directly and by using binomials, he was calculating 125^2 at bedtime last night. Earlier he had told me that 121^2 = 11^4 = 14641, he noted that this mapped to the pattern in Pascal�s triangle and then generalized the relationship between the rows of Pascal�s triangle and the powers of 11. [Though I respond to him I avoid leading him: he made these connections completely on his own] At school he has been accelerated to 4th/5th grade math, the highest class available. While his language is certainly strong I would expect his mathematical/abstract reasoning to be at least as strong if not stronger.

Thanks for this reassurance. I�ve been most concerned that in addition to motor delays he has some kind of visual processing challenge. It�s possible that his twin - who is academically advanced but not jaw-droppingly so, and far less academically driven - may be phenomenally good at visual spatial problem solving so he appears to be lagging in comparison.

Thanks again for your very helpful insights and perspective.

That is some impressive math development! So that suggests the WIAT-III mps result was not a fluke. In fact, he surpassed the minimum raw score necessary to max out the standard score by quite a bit, if he got out at least to item #56.

On substitutions: yes, limited subtest substitution can be done, however, in his case, the only one that would make a difference is to use Zoo Locations for the FSIQ, instead of Picture Memory, and the way you have listed them suggests that this was already done. In the remaining cases, the substitution would result in the same or lower Index/IQ scores than the standard subtest would.

Your concern with visual spatial problem solving may be confounded by motor delays, if the primary indicator is performance on mazes. I would look at motor-free spatial reasoning instead, such as the ability to predict paper snowflakes. (Fold a piece of paper in front of him, make a couple of cuts, and then ask him what he thinks the paper will look like when it's unfolded. Then unfold it and see how accurate he was. Ideally, you would have a field of possible answers for him to view and select, prior to unfolding, such as on the old Stanford-Binet.) Or, when doing jigsaw puzzles, whether he can identify the correct piece (not necessarily manipulate it into the puzzle, but simply pick it out by eye). How's his sense of direction? Can he judge sizes and distances by eye? Just a few ideas.

Or it could be that your speculation is correct, and he's just less exceptional at visual spatial reasoning than his twin is. (Still pretty good, though!)

Thanks. From reading this board I know that you are knowledgeable, thoughtful, and well thought of. Your opinion means a lot.

Thanks for this explanation. Though I am not hung up on the numbers - and with no intention of sounding entitled or arrogant - I was surprised that the FR and WM Index scores and FSIQ were so low, especially since I was entirely unsurprised by the MPS score and would have predicted relatively high verbal comprehension scores.

Thanks for these suggestions. The initial incidents that alerted me to a potential visual spatial issue were at ~4.5 when:
a) He struggled to solve mazes on a smart tv, even when one child was operating the remote (limiting the impact of motor skills) and the other was calling out instructions. His sister was also much better at Reversi on the same system.
b) We had 12 piece jigsaw puzzles from the time the children were ~3. They were very adept with the puzzles so we packed them away for several months. When we took the puzzles out again he didn�t know how to begin to solve them, while his twin put them together as fast as her hands could move. Historically he was always slower than her at doing the puzzles, but I had assumed this was purely due to motor issues.

More recently he struggled when asked to draw mirror images of relatively simple shapes (he probably felt additional stress due to the fact that it involved drawing and was at Math Circle where he is by far the youngest). The evaluator noted that in the WPPSI-IV FR matrix reasoning subtest he confused directionality on two advanced items for his age.

Jigsaws are currently a little harder to assess. He has been working on jigsaws in OT but I don�t know the details of what happens there. At home he especially loves maps and over the holidays put together a new map of the world quickly, but that may not be a good measure since a map puzzle could involve reading and memory. With jigsaws that he has done before he seems to develop a very specific memory of particular pieces so he is not exactly solving the puzzle the second time around. Perhaps there is a subtle difference between visual identification/initially solving a jigsaw and remembering where an item should be located?


It�s certainly not a bad thing for him to be less innately talented than his twin at something broadly mathematical. She is ahead of most age peers at school but our �slow�(er) math / reading learner at home. Good for them both for her to shine while he has to work harder to get the same result. But if he has an underlying weakness or issue I�d like to understand and support it.

Thanks again for all your insights.

Hm. It sounds like he has exceptional simultaneous spatial memory (hence zoo locations), but weaknesses in visual-motor sequencing. This affects skills like motor planning (mazes, placing puzzle pieces, handwriting, utensil/pencil use, even articulation, in some cases), and may explain the lower sequential memory score. Incidentally, some in the field of cognition hold that simultaneous thinkers (which this profile could be) are more math-y.

He's very young still, but I would keep an eye on the directionality and sequencing. Spelling and written expression might emerge as concerns in the future. And handwriting, of course.

Thank you. Your insights are illuminating and helpful.

aeh - I sent you a PM. Thanks.

I sent you one back.