Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Funky numbers on Woodcock Johnson: human error?

Hi all--first time poster here. I recently dug out my WJ-R test scores (from the '90s) and am confused about something that might be obvious to some of you. On the typed educational assessment provided by my examiner, she lists my standard score on the Broad Cognitive Ability-Extended Scale* as 144 [I'm not using my real numbers]. On the test results themselves, there's a bar for "BROAD COGNITIVE ABILITY (Ext.)" that says 139. She does this for several individual subtests as well, sometimes raising and sometimes lowering the scores I see in the printed results or using one set of scores in the wrong place. Am I looking at some long-unnoticed human error? Or might some kind of norming have happened between the numbers on the printed report and those on the typed assessment? I know that the phenomenon where "the total does not equal the average of the parts" happens and is expected between individual and composite scores**, but I don't think this is the same thing--this is "the numbers on the printout don't match the numbers in the assessment." Anyone understand this/seen it before? Thanks!

*Broad Cognitive Ability is the older test's version of what is now called General Intellectual Ability on the WJ-IV. It's slightly different in weighting but roughly equivalent.

**See http://www.iqscorner.com/2005/11/quantoid-lesson-composite-standard.html and the .pdf linked from there.

Welcome!

I would look first at some simple human error category items, such as whether the columns are properly lined up on your printout. This is a surprisingly common source of confusion, which could have affected either your examiner's or your own reading of the scores. Or both. Sometimes people read one end or the other of the confidence interval (usually 90% or 95%) instead of the actual score.

Secondly, it is possible that she reported scores based on age norms in the narrative, but grade norms in the chart. Or the reverse. Those scores would be slightly different from each other, and could vary either up or down, depending on the age/grade of the examinee and the specific test. The decision to interpret one or the other is a clinical one; different examiners may reasonably come to different choices.

pm'd you.