Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WISC and age 6 - Dottie?

Hi all -
The county's school psychologist once told me that age 6 was a bad age for the WISC, that is was testing "low". She recommended waiting until age 7. Is this anyone else's experience, Dottie, any comments?
Thanks!

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughtst too. (sure they should be normed but there are differences between theory & practice).

JB

Well, my DS was tested with the WISC at age 6 and his score was within 2 points of his WPPSI score (age 4.5). So, in his case at least, the scoring seems fairly consistent.

Thank you, Dottie! Perhaps it was just en empirical observation that some 6 year olds did not do well, and the person was very un-scientifically passing this along!

Does that mean that the age brackets are every 4 months? I was wondering whether they had the same as WPPSI (every 3 months), but it would make sense to have them less frequently in older children when they would expect less developmental changes.

It is so random. We scheduled the WISC when it was practical that meant this past week, right before school started. I had no idea what age brackets they had, and thought that she'd probably be in the middle of one (between 6:6 and 6:9), or just starting one if they did every 6 months. She turned out to be a couple of weeks shy of the 6:8.

Anyway, I don't have the scores yet, but it is so random that the results would probably have been lower (slighty I suppose) had the test been a couple of weeks later.

Very interesting in the Coding section. I can't think of anything in which an advantage of 2 full years is not significant at that age.

My dd took the WISC-IV at age 6 and scored very high, though her lowest was processing speed by 14 points. Never thought too much about that because I thought it was common for gifted kids to have lower processing speeds compared to VCI and PRI. Interesting information, Dottie!