Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Slosson correlation with WISC?

I'm asking for a friend so hopefully someone will have good info! I'm not finding much more recently than 1987.

Back story: My friend's daughter received her scores on our district screening which was the SIT (Slosson Intelligence Test) I believe they used the primary version but I'm not sure. The form she got from the district only has a normative curve (85) percentile ranking (95) and IQ (127).

Our district requires a hard 130 for GT program entrance. I've encouraged her to do private testing, which our district will accept. Her daughter consistently scores in the 99.9th percentile on her NWEA MAP testing and is best friends with my DS. I'm a bit stunned that she didn't score higher!

So the question: She's desperate to have her daughter in the GT cluster because the two best teachers in 3rd and 4th grade in our school are there, the class is run far more creatively and more project based. Anybody know how the Slosson correlates with the WISC? Can you tell me more about the test and a rough guess whether or not it'll be worth the money to have her do the WISC instead?

Hmm... Dottie that doesn't bode well for my case :-) She is a very very verbal, precocious and chatty girl with no hint of shyness at all. So theoretically, it could actually be an overscore. That doesn't line up with what I've seen of her in person or in the classroom though or with her MAP scores.

The test was administered by someone from the district office who works in special programs. I don't think she's even a school guidance counselor- or maybe she used to be but isn't currently.

I've been nudging her to do private testing because I think the report will be useful for her and the info will help her understand her daughter better, if nothing else.

Thanks for your help!

Nope, the district won't give a breakdown- just the percentile, IQ and normative curve numbers. They didn't even explain what those were to her- just a little made up Word table with it inserted. I had to explain it all just so she could figure it out!

I'm not even sure what revision they were using. That's how cryptic the report is. Heck, our district is so corrupt that I'm not sure they even did a real test- they could have just asked her 5 questions and called it good enough!

She's entering 3rd grade and scored 99th percentile for an incoming 6th grader in both reading and language usage. She scored incoming 5th grader 99th percentile in math. So while technically MAP doesn't measure 99.9th on their report, the school is categorizing her as that because she's so far above the 99th for her own grade level.

I'll talk to mom about FERPA but I doubt they'll give it up. I actually doubt they have it. They likely made a calculation, entered the data and made the table and dumped the rest. This is a school district that "accidentally" bought a huge piece of land to build a school, only to realize later that it was designated greenspace and they couldn't build on it for 100 years.

I'm always shocked with these districts that are so tight on the GT admission. Our local districts seem to have the opposite problem.

Up to 50% of the kids in some of our schools have GT ids and are in GT classes b/c their teachers and parents filled out behavioral forms that said they behaved gifted even without particularly high ability or achievement scores.

The ones who are in on the ability and/or achievement scores have sometimes taken the same test over and over until they got a score in the 95th percentile on any one area to qualify. And then you have kids like my younger dd whose IQ scores & WIAT more than qualify but who had to go through a panel in the district to see if they were willing to consider IQ as part of a gifted id.

You'd think that, with such high MAPS scores they might at least consider that the group ability test was an underestimation. Would they accept a private IQ test if she had that done? I'd hate to spend the $ not knowing how it will come out, but it sounds like she needs the score for advocacy purposes, so it might be worth it to see if it works out.

Yep Cricket, they will accept private testing. In fact, they seem to encourage it. I asked them to consider my DS for GATE identification early, even though they don't test at all until 2nd grade. They happily said "Oh we don't do that but if you have private testing, we'll qualify him and provide services."

They went ahead and did the WISC today and Dottie was right, the Slossen turned out to be an overestimation of her abilities... or something else is going on.

The ed.psych said her FSIQ was 109 and she'd get the formal report to her later next week. The psych had extreme concerns about ADHD and said that the girl was extremely distractable, unable to refocus even with short breaks and overall was like a textbook ADHD child. She was surprised to hear that her achievement was so high and said that she must be coping very well at school to be able to get by.

This just added to the mystery of how to best educate my friend's child. They're happy they did the private testing and feel like they got really good information but are stuck in a "now what?" kind of scenario. A kid who achieves like a HG kid but doesn't test that way doesn't get a whole lot of service at school. They may go ahead and pursue the ADHD label with the school or not... they don't know yet.

I think "something else is going on" has to be the answer. I am bothered by claims like "xxx overestimates" a person's abilities. There is NO one test that can tell us a child does not have some given level of ability. I have a child who tested in the mild MR range at age 5 (my son with autism) and that turned out to be a BS diagnosis.

Years earlier, my brother tested below the cutoff for G&T more than once (in lower and middle school) but then made the cut easily later.

After leaving the place where my son got the MR diagnosis (which happened to be UC SF), we were lucky to work with psychologists who had a very different way of interpreting the test results (at least for kids on the autism spectrum). These psychologists (Ph.D level, including some top people who had trained at UCLA) interpreted the IQ test results VERY differently: they would look at the higher scores in some of the areas (matrix reasoning, picture concepts, whatever), and view the HIGHER scores as the more accurate estimate of the child's ability. As my son with autism overcame much of his disability (thanks to intensive ABA), sure enough, those other skills (which had earlier tested low) increased substantially.

In the case of this one child we are discussing on this thread, just the description about "extreme concerns about ADHD" makes me wonder if something else was going on that day and distracted the girl. WHo knows? Do we dare presume (even in our own minds) to claim some arbitrary limit to what this girl can achieve, or claim to know some limit to her potential? I think not. I hope the parents of this high achieving girl do not come to think she is "average" as she certainly is NOT.

She'll have the breakdown next week and hopefully I can get them just for my own curiosity. According to my friend the psych was surprised how roundly average she was because she's so verbal and chatty. But her biggest "problem" on the test was constantly interrupting the psych and trying to guess the answer before she finished the question, even with repeated reminders to wait until she was done.

My friend was actually a bit relieved by the psych's report. I didn't know but mom has lots of trouble at home getting her to do her homework, read or play alone, basically anything that requires sustained attention for more than 10 min. The mom has complained to her husband who said all kids are like that.

If nothing else, my friend had her personal doubts in her own head confirmed and she felt more comfortable sharing them with me. Now she knows she can at least talk about them to someone.

CAMom, no, not all kids are like that and yes, she should be evaluated for ADHD. My dd also did well on those standardized tests because she is smart - and they are multiple-choice, so she could immediately "guess" the correct answer. The questions don't require sustained attention. I hope your friend finds the answers she is looking for, because it can be a challenge.

Thank you for taking the time to post about the situation/process with your friend. It is very similar to the process we have gone through with our daughter and shed light on just how much her ADHD may have affected her testing.

- Sky